David Fincher’s World War Z sequel will begin pro­duc­tion next year

Giv­en that he’s only made 10 movies in a 25-year career, not to men­tion the laun­dry list of unre­alised projects to his name – includ­ing, most recent­ly an adap­ta­tion of the UK sci-fi series Utopia for HBO – it’s always worth tak­ing any news of a forth­com­ing David Finch­er project with a pinch of salt.

That being said, it now seems as though the director’s plans to helm a fol­low-up to Marc Forster’s 2013 zom­bie apoc­a­lypse thriller World War Z have final­ly been firmed up. That’s accord­ing to pro­duc­ers Dede Gard­ner and Jere­my Klein­er, who gave an update on the long-ges­tat­ing sequel to Vari­ety this week stat­ing that pro­duc­tion is sched­ule to begin in June 2019.

Finch­er has report­ed­ly been work­ing close­ly with screen­writer Den­nis Kel­ly over the past few years to get the script up to grade. This fol­lows the depar­ture of JA Bay­one, who left the project in 2016 to pur­sue Juras­sic World: Fall­en King­dom. The real­ly good news is that Brad Pitt is still attached and will reprise his role both as pro­duc­er and star, mark­ing his first col­lab­o­ra­tion with Finch­er since 2008’s The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin Button.

The first World War Z film, based on Max Brooks’ cult nov­el from 2006, had a famous­ly rocky pro­duc­tion, includ­ing last-minute script rewrites and major sched­ul­ing issues. So it’s encour­ag­ing to hear that Finch­er and Kel­ly are in no rush to hur­ry World War Z 2 out – and even more so that a time­frame for prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy appears to have been drawn up. Finch­er is cur­rent­ly shoot­ing the sec­ond sea­son of Netflix’s ser­i­al killer dra­ma Mind­hunter, which is set for release next summer.