WORLD WAR Z arrives on Blu-ray/DVD this week. It features an extended cut whose announcement had many people hoping that the film’s legendary “original ending” (outlined HERE) might be intact. Said ending would’ve brought the “World War” to a film whose nature never really lived up to the title’s promise (save for its all too brief, closing montage) - an ending which was scrapped and replaced by re-shot material seen in the theatrical release.
This ending...is not on the home video release, leaving fans to wonder if we’d ever see the dramatically expanded, far vaster version which was excised. That answer, according to WWZ director Marc Forster, is most likely...”no.”
“I don’t think you’ll ever see the Russia sequence, because we never really finished it; we never spent the money to do the visual effects. Once we shot it and we did a rough cut, everyone agreed that this is too big and too exhausting, it would be better to go a simpler route. So to finish the sequence aside from fine tuning it you would have to do massive amounts of CG work, which would be in the millions of dollars, so I don’t think anyone would want to spend the money on that. It’s a fantastic sequence, like the Israel one, but it’s just too much. It was too big and not the right ending."
...says Forster in THIS interview with Foster over at movies.com.
I rather like Marc Forster movies and enjoyed WWZ...more often than not. However, his comment brings us full circle. There was very littleactual “World War” scale in a film entitled WORLD WAR Z - so I’m not exactly sure how the scrapped ending could be ‘too big’? If anything, the smallness of the film’s finale (as released) seemed dissonant with the scale of the picture we’d seen to that point.
So, I find this frustrating. What are your thoughts?
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Glen Oliver
"Merrick"
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