The film adaptation of the critically acclaimed novel by The Zombie Survival Guide mastermind Max Brooks is indeed still alive with three co-financiers ready to help resurrect the massive project.

Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Quantum of Solace) has been attached to direct World War Z with Brad Pitt to play the leading role of a journalist interviewing those affected by the zombie apocalypse that has engulfed earth after an outbreak has ravaged the world. The novel plays out as a factual account of the zombie war, which details various survivors and their experiences in different parts of the world with the outbreak and fallout.

Read more/discuss. Thanks Sandra.

Last July we found out that Brad Pitt would lead the adaptation of Max Brooks global apocalypse book World War Z, and shortly thereafter a leaked Paramount e-mail confirmed the project’s priority status. However, it’s been about nine months since the, and no development seems to have surfaced. Now Vulture says that’s because Paramount is having some trouble finding a co-financier to help fund the film’s $125 million+ budget. But the worst part is that unless someone steps up to the plate, the adaptation from Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace) could end up dead in the water. Anyone have millions of dollars lying around?
Thankfully, frequent funding friend David Ellison (of Oracle Corp.) might be part of an eleventh hour effort to get the film off the ground. Paramount Film Group President Adam Goodman says, “We’re really committed to making a big, kick-ass giant movie with Marc Forster and Brad Pitt.” Though studios have had trouble with high profile, high concept properties recently (see Universal’s misstep with At the Mountains of Madness), this one seems like less of a problem considering Forster has already agreed to a PG-13 version of the story.

Read more/discuss. Thanks Sandra.

Small mention from an interview with the writer.

Mottola is penning romantic novel adaptation “Important Artifacts” for Natalie Portman, Paramount and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. “It’s a writing-only gig that doesn’t have a director, so I may throw my hat in the ring, and there’s a slight chance Pitt might want to be in it,” he says.

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Brad Pitt is negotiating to star in and produce Cogan’s Trade, a comedic crime saga that re-teams Pitt with Andrew Dominik, who directed Pitt in the gunslinger role in the 2007 Western The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. This time, Pitt will play Jackie Cogan, a professional enforcer who investigates a heist that takes place during a high stakes poker game held under the protection of the mob.

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Comic-Con is barely underway in San Diego and we already have some big news from the show floor!

While chatting up “World War Z” author Max Brooks at the booth for comic publisher Avatar Press, the writer confirmed to MTV News that the adaption of his novel about the zombie apocalypse is not only moving forward, but Brad Pitt is now officially attached to star in the film. Additionally, Brooks revealed that Paramount has optioned the movie rights to two more of his projects: “The Zombie Survival Guide” and “The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks” graphic novel.

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Brad Pitt continues to indulge his bromance with hotshot financial journalist Michael Lewis. The actor has already agreed to star in a big-screen adaptation of Lewis’s 2003 best seller, Moneyball, at Columbia Pictures. Now Vulture has learned that Pitt, who is producing an adaptation of The Big Short, Lewis’s explication of America’s 2008 financial meltdown, is moving quickly to get his most recent best seller made: Insiders tell Vulture that Paramount and Pitt’s company, Plan B, are imminently hiring screenwriter Charles Randolph (The Interpreter) for a cool three-quarters of a million dollars to adapt the Lewis book.

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Brad Pitt is gearing up to produce a new film set in the world of journalism. Deadline New York is reporting that Pitt and his Plan B production company have picked up the rights to the new novel The Imperfectionists.

The film will be based on the novel by Tom Rachman that was recently published this spring and centers on an English-language newspaper
in Rome. Rachman is a former AP writer who was stationed in Rome and based the book off his own experiences and it was said that the novel explores the professional and personal lives of journalists.

Plan B struck a deal for the film with Reliance Entertainment, which the site reports gives Pitt and his company, “another option when home studio Paramount Pictures says no” to film projects.

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Inferno Entertainment has come aboard as international sales agent on James Gray’s red-hot adventure project The Lost City Of Z to star Brad Pitt.

Buyers have been flocking to the project, which is being styled in the vein of Lawrence Of Arabia and is based on Gray’s adapted screenplay of David Grann’s recent bestseller.

The true story takes place in the early twentieth century and charts 30 years in the life of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, a former decorated British soldier turned explorer.

Fawcett developed an obsession for the Amazon and became convinced that an advanced civilisation lived within the interior after several adrenaline-fuelled expeditions where he narrowly escaped death from tribal encounters, deadly animals and devastating diseases.

He eventually lost backing for the trips and self-funded a final trek into the Amazon with his son from which neither returned.

It is understood Pitt’s Plan B will produce. Inferno’s Bill Johnson and Jim Siebel declined to comment, however they would most likely come aboard as executive producers.

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The second project is a rewrite of the Paramount film “Battling Boy,” which is part of Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company. The film is based on the graphic novel of the same name, which is about “the son of a god who is sent down by his father from the top of a mountain to rid the giant city of Monstropolis of a plague of beasts.” Aren’t beasts supposed to be in a place called Monstropolis? This also is unrelated to Tim Burton’s proposed “Monsterpocalypse,” and thank god, the more monsters (or killing of monsters) the better. Hopefully Green and Parkinson can make something fun out of this, but honestly it kind of sounds like a paycheck development gig. The screenplay was originally written by “Watchmen” script writer Alex Tse.

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Brad Pitt and Darren Aronofsky are teaming up in the wild.

The thesp and director have set up the adventure thriller “The Tiger” at Focus Features and have tapped Guillermo Arriaga to pen the script.

Project, which is based on an upcoming nonfiction book by John Vaillant, takes place on the Siberian plain, where human development is encroaching on the tigers’ habitat — and one tiger turns on the intruders. With townspeople being tracked and hunted with an almost supernatural power, a conservationist game warden must face down the tiger. It is a fight that only one of them can win.

“The Tiger,” which will be produced by Pitt’s Plan B and Aronofsky’s Protozoa Pictures, is being developed as a potential starring vehicle for Pitt.

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Paramount isn’t letting the zombies off the lot just yet, renewing the option to make “World War Z,” a bigscreen adaptation of Max Brooks’ best-selling post-apocalyptic tome about a worldwide infestation of flesh-eating zombies.
Filmmaker Marc Forster is developing the project, while Brad Pitt’s Plan B shingle is producing.

In his tome, Brooks — son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft — tells the tale of a researcher for the U.N. Postwar Commission who interviews survivors from all over the world in order to put together a post-mortem on a war that destroyed every country around the globe.

Brooks, attending C2E2 last week in Chicago, told MTV.com that Matthew Michael Carnahan is doing a rewrite of Michael Straczynski’s adapated script for Paramount.

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Empire Leicester Square
London, UK

Monday 22nd March 2010
Guests arrive from 18:00

Attendees will include: Brad Pitt, Claudia Schiffer, Ellie Goulding, Matthew Vaughn, Mark Strong, Jane Goldman, Aaron Johnson, Mark Milla and John Romita Jr.

Thanks Dulci & Gabriella.

The nine-day film SXSW film fest opens March 12 with the world premiere of Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, starring Aaron Johnson, Cholë Grace Moretz and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who will all attend a Conversation panel at the SXSW Film Conference, along with the comic’s writers, Mark Millar and John S. Romita.

“Kick-Ass” most certainly does. Equal parts audacious dark comedy, wish-fulfillment fantasy and over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek action-adventure, Matthew Vaughn’s bloody funny adaptation of a cult-fave comicbook series manages to be sufficiently faithful to its source material to please fervent fanboys while remaining easily accessible for ticketbuyers unfamiliar with the superhero storytelling conventions Vaughn (“Layer Cake”) and co-scripter Jane Goldman satirize as well as celebrate. Scenes of hilariously overstated violence perpetrated by an 11-year-old girl doubtless will discomfort many and incense quite a few. But this deservedly R-rated Lionsgate release should nonetheless score a knockout in theatrical and homevid venues.

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