More Zombies on the Rise: Unreleased Zombie Video Game and Short Movie Draw Interest From Hollywood
Posted 03.01.11 by Ryan
Whether its zombies or vampires, the undead are fast-becoming permanent staples in television and movies. Zombie godfather George Romero is still knocking out low-budget, zombie movies like last year's Survival of the Dead, and AMC's The Walking Dead TV show also subscribed to Romero's classic, shambling zombies and scored a hit that had larger ratings than network mainstay Mad Men.
Meanwhile, zombies scored big at the box office with more athletic versions of zombies featured in 2009's Zombieland and (the few times they showed up) in 2010's Resident Evil: Afterlife. Even Europe has jumped into the zombie craze with the Norwegian Nazi zombie flick Dead Snow, the French zombie/mobster hybrid The Horde and Spain's zombie/demons featured in [Rec] and [Rec] 2. With everyone looking for the next great zombie movie, producers are scouring all of popular culture for the next, great zombie movie.
The Playlist reports that production company Blue-Tongue Films (responsible for 2010's Animal Kingdom, which garnered actress Jacki Weaver an Oscar nomination) is looking to get into the zombie biz by adapting director Spencer Susser's 2007 short I Love Sarah Jane into a feature length movie. Susser directed the upcoming Hesher, which stars Natalie Portman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and scored with audiences at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
Susser's I Love Sarah Jane starred Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) in an early role as the object of affection for a young boy living in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested world. The project may or may not be Susser's next movie. Check out the entire short here.
Video games are from the most unique source of movie adaptations, but game developer created a viral sensation when they released a preview trailer for their upcoming video game Dead Island, which has had little else announced about it since 2008. Seen over 3 million times on IGN's YouTube
Despite the trailer's lack of sound effects or even dialogue, many were disturbed by the CGI gore, but producer Sean Daniel (The Mummy) wasn't, reportedly buying the movie rights two days later. Game publisher Koch Media, quickly attempted to set the record straight, with head of global business development Malte Wagener telling The LA Times that Daniel had only contacted Techland about the rights, and nothing had been sold yet. However, according to Wagener, the game is receiving "a lot of inquiries" from "major players for film adaptation" including "a couple of big-name directors."
One of the top directors in Hollywood sent a studio his link to the trailer and said he was interested in this, and the studio contacted us. There are different opinions of course in how to do this. The first is that you find a producer and then he brings in a creative team. The other is to find a director first and he'll bring people along. My feeling is we should find a director first.
Considering the viral attention caused by the trailer alone, it probably won't take long for Dead Island to land a director. Check out the game's trailer here.