j michael straczynski Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Now how's this for a cool premise? "U.S. states secede from the U.S. and form their own governments that wage a civil war against each other after Washington, D.C., is wiped out in a nuclear blast and chaos ravages the nation." Sounds like it could make for a fairly novel action flick, eh? Well, as Variety informs us, that's the exact plot of a 2005 video game called Shattered Union. (Just because I've never heard of it doesn't mean it's not good. If you've played this one, leave us a mini-review in the comments section.)

The tale of a dystopian American Civil War Part II will come from producer Jerry Bruckheimer (don't act surprised), who in turn will entrust the adaptation to one J. Michael Straczynski. Serious genre fans know this gentleman as the co-creator of Babylon 5. He's written tons of TV, in addition to Eastwood's Changeling, plus he's got a metric ton of massive projects on the way, World War Z and Silver Surfer among them. The studio will be Disney, so don't expect a hardcore carnage-fest. I'm generally a fan of the Bruckheimer / Disney action conflagrations, and this one sure sounds like something I'd dig. Now hire Peter Berg to direct it.

Get ready to break out your copies of The Zombie Survival Guide, and be sure to stock up on bottled water and "lobos" (you know, those weapons with which one decapitates the living dead in hand-to-hand combat) -- Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is being made into a film, with J. Michael Straczynski (who's also scribing Silver Surfer) adapting the book for the big screen. The film is being produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment and Paramount is distributing.This is probably old news to some of you, but it's exciting news to me, since I just last night finished reading World War Z.

I was absolutely immersed in this book and found it hard to put down. I've had deliciously scary zombie nightmares regularly while reading it, and have spent waayyyyyy more time than is probably healthy in discussions with my husband about the practical issues surrounding surviving a plague of the undead, comparing World War Z to Stephen King's plague book, The Stand, and pondering whether such a thing as an undead plague could actually scientifically happen (see, this kind of freakish obsessiveness is why I don't read or watch a lot of horror ...).