10 First Draft Movie Ideas Better Than What We Got

3. Actually Adapting The Novel - World War Z

The Original Idea

The first draft of World War Z by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski actually attempted to adapt Max Brooks' beloved epistolary zombie novel, by having government employee protagonist Gerry (Brad Pitt) - a character fabricated for the movie - travel the world and collect stories from survivors of the zombie apocalypse.

It was a neat device to allow the film to invoke many of the accounts from Brooks' novel, while not just devolving into a blatant anthology film of disparate zombie narratives.

What We Got

Straczynski's script was thrown out once director Marc Forster came aboard, who in the writer's own words, wanted to make a "big, huge action movie that wasn’t terribly smart and had big, huge set pieces in it."

And that's exactly what World War Z ultimately turned to be - a CGI-fuelled, over-budgeted PG-13 slog with little of character or narrative interest.

But more frustratingly, it was World War Z in name only, taking virtually zero influence from the beloved source material and simply using the title for cynical branding purposes.