A public, but still limited, event held in New Jersey Wednesday night continued Paramount’s push to introduce Marc Forster’s World War Z to audiences. None other than Brad Pitt attended a public sneak of the anticipated zombie thriller, which several media members attended … weighing in on the film’s impact below.
“We gotta do a screening for the fans. So, we decided there was no better place to do that than Jersey,” Pitt exclaimed to a packed theater, according to ScreenCrush, which was in attendance. The site went on to describe the film as a “crowd-pleaser,” saying, “If you’ve heard any of the production problems the film has had, don’t believe the hype: World War Z isn’t a disaster. But as a disaster movie, it’s actually pretty good.”
Huffington Post editor Mike Hogan, who attended a smaller, celebrity-filled screening at MoMA in New York City weighed in with his own opinion, stating, “I think it works, though I suspect some people who see the movie cold will wonder why its scale contracted instead of expanding. … I'm curious to know what a paying audience will think. But for now, at least, the dark rumors that World War Z would be dead-on-arrival appear to have been greatly exaggerated.”
Both reports are referencing a steady stream of disastrous production stories of a ballooning budget, costly reshoots, an ending that didn’t work, and so on. All of this led those tracking the production to believe that Z would be more trouble for Paramount than it was worth.
Yet as Forbes points out, all of this negative buzz tends to matter to inside-baseball trackers, but has little impact on the box office.
The countless millions of moviegoers who decide the box office fate of World War Z either don’t know about the film’s tumultuous production or don’t care. Oh, the reports of alleged disagreements between Brad Pitt and director Marc Forster may make juicy gossip, but not one single ticket-buyer who is otherwise interested in a large-scale zombie adventure starring Brad Pitt is going to refrain from buying a ticket because the star and the director might not have always get along.”
Too true. If Z is good – and we hope it is – audiences will flock, interested to see the finished product, caring little about what went into making the movie before it reached your local screen.
