Accent Depundent: To Americans, the title is an obvious pun on "World War 3". English speakers from any other country, however, would read it as "World War Zed", so they wouldn't get the pun immediately.
Banned in China: The book is not allowed to be sold in China, according to Max Brooks.
One-Hit Wonder: While Max Brooks' other works are of good quality, it's fair to say that World War Z put him on the map. It was good enough to get the Pentagon to knock on his door and offer a teaching gig at West Point.
Technical Advisor: Max Brooks did an extensive amount of research for the book, interviewing police officers, Federal agents, and FEMA personnel. Amusingly, he remarked that everyone he interviewed had put at least SOME thought into what would happen or what they would do in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse. This is in part because a lot of real-world agencies use the concept as a theoretical example of an Outside-Context Problem, to ensure they can deal with unexpected emergencies.
Banned in China: Due to the movie showing zombies, and due to the actor Brad Pitt being in the movie. Paramount mentioned that Beijing's ban on the film not being in Chinese theaters forced Paramount to can future plans for it.
California Doubling: Filmed in the UK, Hungary and Malta. Despite some scenes being filmed in Wales, England and Hungary are used to double for other scenes set there.
The Cast Showoff: Brad Pitt is shown in one scene preparing to fly a jet. While budget constraints probably rule out his actually flying the jet, he does hold a pilot's license.
Disowned Adaptation: Sort of. While Max Brooks doesn't consider the film an adaptation of his book, he doesn't hate it, because it has so little to do with the book.
"I was expecting to hate it and I wanted to hate it because it was so different from my book, and yet the fact that it was so different from my book made it easier to watch because I didn't watch my characters and my story get mangled. So I was just watching somebody else's zombie movie, which was fun and intense."
Hostility on the Set: Relations between Brad Pitt and Marc Forster had deteriorated to the point that they kept their distance to a maximum extent possible when not shooting scenes and communicated only through written notes.
Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy: Because Jazwares was probably unable to obtain the rights to Brad Pitt's likeness, the action figure of Gerry Lane looks nothing like him — not that it matters, since its quality is notoriously shoddy.
Brad Pitt, the film's producer and star, was most intrigued by the book's geopolitical aspects (what with his partner being a UN Goodwill Ambassador and all), and his production company Plan B, together with Paramount, spent $1 million on the film rights. However, it soon became clear that much of the geopolitics that Pitt was interested in would have to be dropped if they wanted the story to come together on screen. Furthermore, Pitt's production company, Plan B, had never taken on a project of this size, its experience limited to eclectic, low-budget dramas; their biggest film before this were the Julia Roberts rom-com Eat, Pray, Love and the superhero Decon-Recon SwitchKick-Ass.
The real problems started with director Marc Forster, Pitt's personal choice to direct the film — and a man whose whose background (not unlike Plan B) was in making smaller, dramatic films like Finding Neverland and Monster's Ball. His only experience making big-budget tentpole films was the James Bond film Quantum of Solace, known as the Bond movie that few people liked. It was hoped that he would be able to focus on story and characters while his crew could guide him on action and effects, but not only was he unable to bring his usual team with him, the lack of a strong leader at the head of the project produced a muddled vision for what the film would be like. As late as three weeks before shooting was to begin in June 2011, Forster hadn't even decided yet on what the zombies would look like or how they would behave.
Forster and screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski clashed throughout the writing process. Forster wanted to focus on the action, which Straczynski felt detracted from the story's main themes; he was more interested in remaining faithful to the book, focusing on the characters and the global reaction to the Zombie Apocalypse. Straczynski was eventually fired and replaced with Michael Carnahan (writer of The Kingdom and Lions for Lambs), who made the film an action-adventure focused on a UN field specialist named Gerry Lane, dropping the book's first-person accounts. It was at this point that Pitt was cast as Gerry.
And then production began. From the start, it was clear that Pitt, Plan B, and Forster were in way over their heads. Shooting in Malta for the Jerusalem scenes was a nightmare, with two film crews working side-by-side, hundreds of extras, and all sorts of minor costs dealing the budget a Death of a Thousand Cuts. One day, shooting had to be delayed for several hours because the caterer hadn't prepared enough food. When work in Malta finished, the wrap-up crew found a stack of purchase orders related to the cast and extras that had been casually tossed into a desk drawer and forgotten; the amount totaled in the millions of dollars. And all the while, the script still wasn't finished, with work still being done on the third act.
Things got no better when production moved to Glasgow for the Philadelphia scenes. Forster began to fight with both Pitt and the head of the SFX team; the latter was dismissed after principal filming ended. Cinematographer Richard Richardson asked more than once to leave the project, and struggled to keep the crew under control, often antagonizing them in the process. Furthermore, Pitt's schedule conflicted with his commitment to starring in Killing Them Softly, and he also took time off to spend time with his family, pushing production back even further.
During shooting in Budapest in October for the climax in Russia, the crew found out the hard way that their 85 "prop" assault rifles were in fact fully-functional weapons when a Hungarian anti-terrorism unit raided their warehouse and seized the guns. Furthermore, Paramount, after seeing how out-of-control production had gotten in Malta, ordered a scaling back of the budget, forcing the production to scrap a number of scenes. Members of the production criticized the third act as "Rambo vs. zombies", losing the character-driven drama of the rest of the film, and production wrapped with the knowledge that rewrites and reshoots were inevitable.
In June 2012, Paramount ordered, depending on the source, anywhere from five to seven weeks of reshoots totaling forty minutes worth of the film. They also hired Damon Lindelof to do a third-act rewrite; he later brought in his old Lost buddy Drew Goddard to help him give the script a thorough overhaul after determining that it had much deeper problems. A climatic twelve-minute battle sequence (that they already filmed, at great expense) was dropped entirely, and an entirely new major character played by Peter Capaldi was created. This pushed the film's release from December of that year to June 2013. By this point, the budget had ballooned to anywhere from $170 to $250 million depending on who you ask, and the filmmakers had only 72 minutes' worth of largely incoherent footage to show to the studio.
During reshoots, Forster and Pitt reportedly weren't on speaking terms — Forster's notes for Pitt had to be relayed through an intermediary.
Stillborn Franchise: World War Z was planned as a trilogy, with David Fincher planning to direct a sequel to this movie with Brad Pitt reprising his role, which was ultimately cancelled in February 2019 due to China banning this film, as mentioned above.
The film was originally going to be more along the lines of the book, with a focus on the politics and effect the whole Zombie outbreak had. Brad Pitt was wanting to do so originally and pitched it as that. For reasons not fully clear, this idea was scrapped.
The original ending for the film was very different, and reportedly involved Pitt's character being conscripted onto a Russian anti-zombie squad before finally escaping back to the US.
so bad that Vanity Fair devoted its June 2013 cover story