12 Supposedly Unfilmable Films That Actually Got Made

5. World War Z (2013)

Why It Was 'Unfilmable': A strict adaptation of World War Z would've been better served by an anthology movie or a miniseries (one with an enormous budget, mind), or perhaps even the planned 2008 video game that eventually fell through. That's because Max Brooks' source novel is made up of several stories from across the globe, differing accounts of a worldwide zombie apocalypse. Tying these together in any kind of coherent narrative would have been troublesome, as well as extremely costly. How It Got Made: The World War Z movie jettisons almost all the detail of Brooks' book. And that's perhaps the only way a film version could've been made: Marc Forster's World War Z cost $190 million and is set in four countries - Max Brooks' novel involves over 30 countries and would probably have cost a heck of a lot more. Though undeniably set within Brooks' world, the World War Z film centres on a lead character that wasn't in the book, is set during the outbreak rather than after it and ditches most of the geopolitical focus of the novel. Even the zombies are different in Forster's film; in the movie they run rather than walk, and the 'cure' suggested by writers Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard is nowhere to be found in Brooks' more 'realistic' book.