I don’t rank my favorite movies very often, but if I were to do so, Zombieland would find a place on the list as one of my go-to comedies. I first saw the movie back in 2011, and I loved every minute of it.
Perhaps that was due to my nonexistent expectations — combined with the fact I purchased it blind from Best Buy during a $5 sale because I had just gone through a breakup and was in the mood for some laughs and, well, sitting on the shelf was a movie about zombies, and with Emma Stone on the cover I saw no reason not to grab it. What ensued was one hell of a riotous Friday night in with my brother. Suffice to say, there’s been a spot in my heart for Zombieland ever since.
Well, five years after the film hit theaters — almost to the date actually — it looks like a long-discussed but never green-lit sequel is finally taking a step forward, as Sony has hired The Expendables scribe Dave Callaham to pen the script for Zombieland 2. Callaham, who also received a story credit for this summer’s Godzilla, will be supervised by none other than Ruben Fleischer, who is expected to return to the director’s chair for the sequel.
High praise and box-office success for Fleischer’s original zombie comedy sparked sequel talk shortly after the film’s release, but nothing much came of it. Originally conceived as a television series before becoming a feature film, Zombieland went back to the small screen in 2013 as one of Amazon Studio’s flagship streaming pilots, but wasn’t picked up for series.
I had a chance to watch the pilot episode when it first aired, and while it showed mild potential it was by no means an out-and-out hit, and as you might recall from Variety, it was basically “hated out of existence” by its vocal viewership.
However, now that the property will be returning to the silver screen, maybe it will have a better chance at survival. No word yet on where the story will go in the sequel, but it’s probably a safe bet that the original cast — comprised of Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin — is unlikely to return, at least not in its entirety, given they’ve all moved on to even greater success in recent years. But as we’ve become used to with Zombieland, we’ll just have to play the waiting game to see what happens.
