Zombieland: Double Tap Screenwriters Call Failed TV Series Pilot a “Bummer”

There was once a time Sony tried piggybacking off the success of Zombieland in an attempt to launch a television series just as successful as the budding cult-classic. Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick — creators of the film franchise — wrote a television pilot and before long, Amazon Studios started production on said pilot. Released on Amazon in April 2013, it only took a few weeks for Amazon to decide it wouldn't be ordering the show to series, largely in part to the massive backlash from the Zombieland fandom surrounding the recasting of characters.

Years later, Reese and Wernick — and the original cast — returned to film a direct Zombieland sequel, which has since garnered much better reviews. Still, Reese thinks the failed television show was a "bummer."

"I think there's a little tiny bit of cross-pollination [between the show and Zombieland: Double Tap] but not as much as you'd think," the writer told LRM in a recent interview. "We didn't want to borrow from something that'd already been shot. That actually aired on Amazon for a couple of months, so people had already seen it so we didn't want to borrow too heavily have one borrowing from the other. That said, it all comes from the same hopper of ideas, like we applied the same tone and jokes and all that stuff to that television show."

He added, "If we do some other version of Zombieland whether it'd be another movie or Broadway musical or whatever, we'll continue to come from the same wellspring of ideas. But no, we had a blast making that. It was a bummer it didn't go past the pilot, but you do what you can."

Commercially speaking, Double Tap went on to gross $121.77 million worldwide, a modest success when factoring in the reported $48 million production budget. Together, both Zombieland flicks have grossed just north of $224 million.

Zombieland: Double Tap is now available wherever movies are sold.