You hear that sound? It’s the studio heads of Relativity, Fox and Disney collectively cursing as Paramount have just thrown a major spanner in the works on the December 2012 calendar.
Landing on the same day (currently) as Phillip Noyce‘s “Hunter Killer,” Ang Lee‘s “Life of Pi” and Johnny Depp‘s “Lone Ranger,” Paramount has announced they’ll be dropping their Brad Pitt-led zombie movie “World War Z” into theaters on December 21, 2012. The film is currently shooting with Marc Forster directing the Black List-approved script by J. Michael Straczynski (with rewrites by Matthew Michael Carnahan) that centers on a UN bureaucrat named Gerry Lane, who in the aftermath of the zombie war is asked to compile a complete report on the incident. Our fellow writer read the script and praised the “smart structure that keeps the nature of the book intact [which] should manage to separate the finished film from the omnipresent likes of ‘Resident Evil’ and ‘Survival of the Dead.’ ”
Bryan Cranston, Matthew Fox, James Badge Dale, Elyes Gabel and Mirielle Enos co-star in the film that will be a smart counter-programming flick in the thick of the awards season or the first zombie-related Oscar contender ever. But that weekend is now stacked, and with “The Hobbit” landing on December 14th, look for the last weekend of December 2012 to start getting crowded. [Box Office Mojo]
