Then someone thought, I don’t know who it was, that had come up with the idea, well what if we did one for Columbus too? Then we thought, well, of course we have to use their old names. We had written a character we called Alpha Tallahassee who was like the more alpha dog version of Tallahassee that he kind of butts heads with. So suddenly we had to abandon the names of our characters and they all got different names, but even though Tallahassee and Albuquerque have a close affinity for some reason in the way they sound, we still had an affection for those original names.
ZOMBIELAND MOVIE ENDING MOVIE
So now the whole movie has to be set in Texas. When we got Atlanta as our shooting location, we thought, well, we can’t use the Sonoran Desert. Reese: The first draft of the first movie took place in the Sonoran Desert, Arizona. Now you’ve reapplied those names to the characters played in the new film by Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch. In the early drafts of the first movie, Tallahassee and Columbus were called Flagstaff and Albuquerque. So yes, it’s a real privilege to have their voice in our head as we’re sitting down to write. So, yeah, these are characters that were born in our head, but then evolved as actors came on and made it their own. Wernick: I mean, it’s such a gift to have the actor’s voice in our head when we’re writing and such talented actors who not only take what’s on the page but elevate it and make us look good. Now you know you’ve got Woody and his particular style and you’ve got Emma, and they’re all very unique personalities. The benefit of the sequel, of course, is that now you know you’ve got these great people and you can write to their voices, write to their personalities, write to their strengths, and then add some new people to freshen it up and throw more energy into the system. So we had no idea we’d be getting stars of this caliber to star. When you wrote the first one, I’m assuming that you didn’t know who would play the roles? So we appreciate the zombies, and they provide us the threat and the stakes, but ultimately it’s about this family. It’s about this family, this dysfunctional family that’s having their ordinary issues that every other family has in this extraordinary world. Wernick: What’s interesting is the movie’s called Zombieland, but it’s not really about zombies.
Were you guys keeping an eye on all this stuff and saying, how do we differentiate our story? Meanwhile, at the same time, Zombieland really kicked off a zombie revival, so to speak.
What does that mean for their relationships, for the evolution of zombies, for the evolution of the physical world around them? How much more has it decayed? So we all leaned into the passage of time at that point. Her father figure’s a little put off by that. Then Paul and I came back and we worked on it for a couple more years, and in that time it really does evolve because now it’s about a young 20-something woman who really is having a chance at a real relationship for the first time in her life. Then ultimately it still wasn’t where people really wanted it to be exactly, where the actors really wanted it to be, even though it was very solid. Reese: Yeah, what’s the next moment for her? Then we were on the Deadpool stuff, and Dave Callaham came on Zombieland 2, did a great job sort of re-conceiving the story around the hunt for Little Rock. Little Rock’s now late teens and suddenly you’re going, she’s not a little girl. We also spoke about how the sequel changed over the past decade, what it’s like to write for Harrelson, and whether they thought they could top the first movie’s classic scene with surprise guest Bill Murray. That was the question we put to Reese and Wernick–who took some time between films to pen another little franchise known as Deadpool–when we recently sat down with them. So why did it take 10 years to get Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Wichita (Emma Stone), and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) back on the screen in Zombieland: Double Tap?
Sure, there had been movies like Shaun of the Dead and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake sprinkled throughout the 2000s, but the October 2009 release of Zombieland made ghouls somehow more mainstream and paved the way for them becoming pop culture staples with the arrival of The Walking Dead one year later.Ī sequel to Zombieland seemed like a no-brainer (sorry).
ZOMBIELAND MOVIE ENDING TV
When Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick first started writing Zombieland (first as a TV pilot and then as a movie), they had no idea that their little “zom-com” would end up being the bleeding edge of an entirely new revival of interest in flesh-eating corpses.