Did you know that ultra-popular zombie movie Zombieland was originally created as a television series that was picked up by CBS? Well, it was indeed, and it’s not completely out of the question that some day in the future it will try once again to find a home on your TV set.
Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick spoke to MTV recently and explained how things had come to be. In 2005, they crafted the story as a pilot episode and sold it to CBS, but it was eventually decided that it just wouldn’t work at a series…as you might imagine. Clearly, if this was ever going to happen, it would have to be on HBO or Showtime — maybe FX at the very minimum, but that wouldn’t be preferable.
Because Zombieland was such a huge hit, the writing duo are already well into writing a sequel to it. They’ve also proven themselves a talented team, and have been hired to write a sequel to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and also the adaptation of popular comic Deadpool, which will star Ryan Reynolds.
So what are the chances that we will see a zombie TV show someday? Well, Reese and Wernick have themselves high hopes for it to happen, and plans in order if it ever does.
I think that’s what we would do probably is recast it – or at least, our four leads. And then, beyond that, we can introduce any characters we want – and that was going to be the joy of the TV show, bringing in new people and killing them off, not killing them off, depending on how we felt about them. We really wanted to explore that.
It would have to be shot differently. It’s funny; you write action and you write gore and you write horror and it’s all how its shot, how it’s presented. You can write it as graphic as you want, it’s just [up to the director] to cut away on the gory stuff on TV. Whereas, you would show it with the clown and the mallet in the movie, where the blood squirts all over the place.
We always thought [it should be a TV series]. If you watch the movie with that in mind, you will see some remnants of the television show. We have the ‘Zombie Kill of the Week,’ which was always intended to happen every week. The movie ends on a cliffhanger; it doesn’t have a real resolution. [The movie’s ending] is just our guys driving off into the sunset for some new adventures. That’s because, that’s how the television pilot ended.
Would you want to see zombies running wild on a weekly basis? Again, I think that if it was on the right network, like an HBO, it would be great fun. But if this happened with someone like CBS, I would have little interest and don’t see how it would work at all.
