In unexpected but extremely welcome film news, Sony Pictures has announced that the main cast of the 2009 horror-comedy Zombieland have all agreed to reunite for a planned sequel.
Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson and Abigail Breslin, the core foursome who banded together to outrun a zombie apocalypse in the first film, have all agreed to return.
Ruben Fleischer, who directed the original, is set to return, while original Zombieland writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, who have gone on to work on the Deadpool films, will pen the script.
The film is set to go into production in January, with a view to releasing it in October 2019, ten years after the first. Per a vague plot description in The Hollywood Reporter:
“The new movie will once again put the focus on comic mayhem, taking the quartet from the White House to the American heartland as they face off against new kinds of zombies that have evolved since the first movie, as well as some new human survivors. But, most of all, according to the studio, they have to face the growing pains of their snarky, makeshift family.”
There’s no word yet on whether Bill Murray, who was killed off in the first one, plans to return for Zombieland 2, although being dead is obviously not a huge bar to appearing in a zombie film.
Interestingly enough, it was announced today that Murray will be starring in an entirely separate zombie-themed film, entitled The Dead Don’t Die.
This new film, directed by indie auteur Jim Jarmusch, will feature Murray alongside Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi and Selena Gomez.
That’s one hell of a cast, and Jarmusch preciously directed Swinton in the brilliant vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive, so we can’t wait to see what he might bring to the zombie genre.
