Mireille Enos, whose new series “Lucky Hank” with Bob Odenkirk premieres this weekend on AMC, is still up for a sequel to 2013’s “World War Z,” even a decade later.
The script was finished for the follow-up to the Marc Forster-directed first film that starred Brad Pitt, and it had top talent attached to help at various points, including David Fincher and J. A. Bayona of “The Impossible.”
“The script for the second movie was great. I wish the world could get to see it,” Enos told TheWrap. “We got really close to making a sequel. At one point David Fincher was signed on there was a completed script which was excellent and then one thing and another you know [and it never got made]. But never say never. I still think it would be great.”
The original film went through extensive reshoots after the ending didn’t test well with audiences, and an entire plot line for Enos’s character, in which she becomes romantically involved with Matthew Fox’s paratrooper, was cut. In the finished film, Fox appears only briefly during the rescue on the apartment rooftop. Will those scenes ever see the light of day?
“No, I think that’s probably gone now,” Enos said. “The was a whole month of shooting and not one minute of it ended up in the film. And that’s okay. The version that came out is excellent. And I think everybody made really, really smart choices and made a really great movie. That’s what it is. I did receive emails along the way saying, ‘We’re still editing’ and ‘I’m so sorry.’ And I was like, ‘That doesn’t matter as long as the movie comes out.’”
The film was a commercial success, grossing more than $540 million against a production budget of $190 million, which made it the highest-grossing zombie film of all time. In 2019, a source told The Hollywood Reporter that China’s ban on zombie movies was the main reason why the sequel, budgeted at $200 million, never happened. Fincher went on to make “Mindhunter” for Netflix and Bayona signed on to direct “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” instead.
Enos was delighted to see that “World War Z” is a featured move on Netflix this month, however. “It’s trending. Is that the right word? My 12-year-old daughter just watched it with one of her girlfriends recently. It was really cute. She thought it was scary and great.”
