News emerged recently that the World War Z movie has been indefinitely delayed, and I wonder if the whole genre might be reaching saturation.
That book's predecessor, The Zombie Survival Guide (2003), along with Shawn of the Dead (2004), played huge roles in jump starting the current zombie rennaissance. It's meant that books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies can debut at number three on the New York Times bestseller list, based essentially on title alone.
It also means Hollywood has been snapping up every title it can get its hands on. Their reach tends to exceed their grasp in these cases, but this one looked like it was actually going to get made. Now what? Is the air going out of the zombie tires? These creatures are potent symbols in our popular culture, but they're also really easy.
And yes, I put myself in that group, too. I was inspired partly by World War Z's unrealized potential to create this blog, but it didn't cost me anything to create. The landscape is flooded with cheap and easy zombies. For every serious 28 Days Later (2002), there's been a hundred movies like the ones in Reel Zombies (2008).
My point is, that book is my flagship. As long as it was full speed ahead, I was watching it blaze paths.
In other Hollywood news, studios were fighting this week over the rights to make a movie based on Asteroids, the 1979 arcade game. Yeah, the one about the triangle shooting dots at the slightly more jagged shapes. (Obligatory link to the cheap and easy Lunar Lander I programmed in flash a couple years ago.)
The best thing to come out of this news: that someone's comment to the Times article came up with the deeper allegory lurking behind one of the earliest video games, "that’s what happens when you try to get rid of your big problems, they turn into lots of small, annoying ones that are harder to avoid." Well stated.
