Open Forum Friday: Are Reshoots and Rewrites Always a Bad Sign?

Posted by on June 8th, 2012   Filed under: Open Forum Friday

The internet was abuzz today with the news that Damon Lindelof, former Lost showrunner and co-writer of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, has been hired to do extensive rewrites on the upcoming zombie flick World War Z. This comes just days after several sources reported that the movie was gearing up for seven weeks of reshoots in Budapest. The Brad Pitt film already experienced a significant delay earlier this year when Paramount pushed its release date back from December 2012 to June 2013. Most people are understandably interpreting the news as a confirmation that the film is in serious trouble, but is this always the right assumption?

Plenty of movies undergo reshoots and still turn out just fine. The Avengers, for example, reportedly brought back the cast and crew for some additional production in early January and The Muppets did a ton of reworking (just check out the DVD for all of the scenes that were left on the cutting room floor). Men in Black 3 is an example of a movie that was supposedly rewriting the script on the fly and it still came out fairly coherent. The truth is, a lot of movies do reshoots just for pick-ups and to help flesh out a scene, not to completely retool the entire film. There’s also the possibility that a director gets new and improved ideas as he is filming and wants to add them to the final product. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening with World War Z, but who knows… it might still be salvageable. What do you think? Are reshoots always an indication of a bad movie or do fans and the media blow these reports out of proportion? Can a movie be saved if the full vision is not there right from the start? Do you still have high hopes for World War Z? Give us your thoughts here on Open Forum Friday.



  • Matt McNeely

    Woody Allen apparently often shoots his films twice. This film is probably not employing that approach.

  • I don’t think that re-shoots or re-writes means a film sucks. They’ve been doing re-shoots as long as they’ve been doing movies, we just never used to hear about them.

    If World War Z ends up sucking, it won’t be because of this, it’ll be because it was already going to.

  • rjdelight

    I wouldn’t say that it’s automatically a bad sign, but it usually is the case. Seven weeks of reshoots and a new writer seems to indicate the current cut of World War Z is pretty bad, but I agree things can always be salvaged. I’m shocked that MiB III turned out as decent as it did after reading all the horror stories from that production. So who knows. Do we know if Marc Forster is directing these reshoots?

  • No way. Rewrites are part of the process, and creators pretty much always learn how to make a movie better after the audience sees it.

  • cap

    I don’t think reshoot of a film is a bad omen, because they are pretty common. Most of the time we don’t even hear about them. But 7 weeks worth of reshoots? That’s anything but common (even for a big movie like World War Z). People are making decent sized movies in that amount of time (something like “Up in the Air” was 8 or 9 weeks I think). Obviously they think it’s salvageable if they are willing to throw as much money on it as it will take to do those reshoots (and pay Lindelof, which will probably be a pretty penny too), but it’s definitely a huge red flag. And I don’t have tons of faith in Lindelof as far as movie writing goes.

  • Its very simple. bad script – you can’t fix in post. Unlike independent film, major productions have the luxury of going back and fixing a script after production starts, then reshoot. A lot of this is caused by scheduling, both opening dates and special effects start, that push scripts in to production before they are ready.

  • kyri

    I just don’t understand this RACIST tendency to prejudge films by whatever factor. re-writes trailers , leaked pictures. I just don’t understand it. If a film comes out and it sucks . OK it sucks, whatever. If it is good , -great! I ll buy it on DVD.

    This peculiar need to generalize and prejudge things it is by nature idiotic and incomprehensible in my eyes. If it was possible to capture the essence of a film in a screen-shot, a trailer or whatever then we would look at that medium and not pay money to watch films.

    It should be illegal to judge on films if you haven’t see them.
    Films should only be judged in the movie theater only.

  • kyri

    And Internet trolls that bash on Criss Nolan’s films should be executed.

  • cap

    I think it’s spelled Kris

  • El Ohroy

    And isn’t it spelled Knolan?

  • kyri

    I am pretty sure is Crizz..

  • You presented a really interesting question. I think, maybe since World War Z was a novel first, perhaps the way the screenplay was written didn’t translate as well as the filmmakers hoped. Despite rewrites and reshoots, WWZ still has great potential.