Brad Pitt Returns for the World War Z Sequel, with the Director of Conclave at the Helm

Paramount is once again moving forward with a sequel to World War Z, 13 years after the original film came out. Brad Pitt will return in the lead role, and Edward Berger, who directed All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave, will take the director’s chair.

Deadline was first to report the new deals. TheWrap and other Hollywood outlets have also confirmed the news.

Pitt will again play former UN employee Gerry Lane and will produce through Plan B Entertainment alongside Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner. Berger will also serve as an executive producer.

The script has been entrusted to British playwright Dennis Kelly, known for the series Utopia and Matilda: The Musical. The plot is still under wraps, and no start date for shooting or release has been announced. There is no official title either — “World War Z 2” remains an informal name for the project.

Pitt and Berger Have Already Made One Film Together

This will be the second collaboration for Pitt and Berger. Earlier in 2026, they finished shooting the psychological drama The Riders for A24, which is currently in post-production. According to Deadline, it was while working on that film that talks about a new World War Z moved into a more active phase.

The sequel’s history, meanwhile, has been unusually long. Paramount has been trying to get a follow-up off the ground almost since the first film became a hit. Over the years, Juan Antonio Bayona and David Fincher each took the director’s chair, and Fincher’s version even reached serious preparation, but the project was halted in 2019.

Interestingly, Kelly already worked on one of the earlier versions of the sequel. So the current project can’t be called a complete start from scratch, though it’s unclear how closely the new script will be connected to the previous drafts.

The original World War Z came out in 2013 and grossed more than $540 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing zombie movie ever. The film was based on Max Brooks’s novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, but it significantly changed the book’s structure, turning a collection of accounts from witnesses to a global catastrophe into the story of Gerry Lane.

The current attempt looks more concrete than many previous announcements: Pitt is locked in for the lead role, Berger for directing, and Kelly is writing the script. Production, however, has not started yet, so it’s too early to talk about when the film might come out.