ZOMBIELAND writers talk sequel!

From MTV Movies Blog:

"Last October, Zombieland took a big, gory bite out of the box-office, debuting at number one and bringing in over $25 million in ticket sales. Immediately, there was talk of a sequel, and when we caught up with the hit film’s writers recently, they said the plans are moving forward.

'We want to stick with our dysfunctional family,' revealed Paul Wernick, who created the post-apocalyptic zombie world with writing partner Rhett Reese. 'But also introduce new characters.'

'There absolutely will be a sequel, and it will absolutely be in 3D,' Reese revealed. 'Now, it’s just a question of what that sequel will be. It’s not a question of having enough ideas, but almost having too many ideas. We have a lot of ideas!'

'We entirely want to write with 3-D in mind,' Wernick added, down the majority of filmmakers who these days claim to concentrate on the story first and the three-dimensional stuff later. 'We have the vision, and want to have fun with the technology.'

Could that mean a zombie head-bashing with a baseball bat, causing the eyes to fly off the screen and into our laps? How about brains splattering all over the movie theater? The writers wouldn’t rule anything out.

'We want you to be looking down at your popcorn to make sure there isn’t on it,' Reese said laughingly. 'There will be a lot of fluids flying!'

These guys have a lot of fun in the writing room, aren’t afraid to mess with the zombie canon, and plan to gleefully continue dragging George Romero’s vision into the 21st century with the sequel. 'We don’t discriminate when it comes to zombies,' laughed Reese. 'We like to think that a zombie’s character isn’t just about their profession, or what their personality was, but what were they doing at that moment they became a zombie.'

As for what else we can expect, Reese said he hopes to give Woody Harrelson’s character a female (we assume, unbitten) who can keep up with his high-adrenaline, zombie-killing ways 'There will be continuing romantic adventures,' he said. 'We haven’t decided on this, but it would be nice to have a love interest for Tallahassee.'

'I think that we like to think about the Zombieland characters in terms of how they survived, what qualities do they have that led them to survive?' Reese said of the defining factor in the new human characters they’ll introduce to fight alongside Tallahassee, Wichita and the rest. 'As long as they have some quality for survival, then they make sense for the movie.'

Finally, Reese said that he has big plans for Abigail Breslin’s tough-talking-tween character. 'I think that it’s going to continue to be about growing up in Zombieland,' he said of Little Rock’s development. 'Growing up in a world that’s not necessarily geared towards growing up; it’s a world that forces you to grow up much quicker than you would have otherwise.'

Zombieland 2 is in its development stages, and should hit the big screen sometime next year or in early 2012."

Wow. A sweetheart for Tallahassee? Who'da thunk it? I was perfectly willing to assume that Tallahassee would simply stay a "father figure" to Little Rock and when he dies, die alone. But then that wouldn't be any fun. It's much more interesting to me now to see Tallahassee slipping over himself to impress a woman (who might actually be more tough than he is).

UPDATE:

From MTV Movies Blog:

"You might not realize it, but long before there was a Zombieland hit movie, there was nearly a Zombieland TV series. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick originally envisioned the reality of a post-apocalyptic, zombie-heavy world as ideal for the television medium, had a pilot script that ended when Wichita and Little Rock drove off and left Tallahassee and Columbus behind, and only expanded it after the networks passed. Now, the flick is on DVD, sequels are on the way – and the writers are determined to still make a Zombieland TV series.

'We wrote it as a TV show almost five years ago – the summer of 2005 - and sold it to CBS,' said Paul Wernick, who conceived the project with his writing partner Rhett Reese as the first-ever zombie TV show. 'Ultimately, it just wasn’t the perfect fit at the right time for CBS, and they ended up not moving forward on it.'

'It was after 28 Days Later, but I think zombies and CBS were never necessarily the greatest of fits,' Reese said. 'Interestingly, we shopped it around everywhere else. Every single network and cable network in America said no, and we’re not sure why… for some reason, they didn’t trust it as a television show, and it ultimately became a movie.'

Asked if they still think Zombieland is a uniquely-suited for-TV idea, Wernick had a simple answer: '[Oh,] yes,' he said with a grin.

These days, the duo are hard at work working on their Zombieland 2 script, Deadpool and a sequel to G.I. Joe, amongst other things. But when they’re done with Zombieland sequels, the writers have every intention of taking the world of laughter and the living to TV.

'I think that’s what we would do probably is recast it - or at least, our four leads,' Reese said of the unlikely possibility that Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and the others would want to do weekly TV years from now. 'And then, beyond that, we can introduce any characters we want - and that was going to be the joy of the TV show, bringing in new people and them off, not them off, depending on how we felt about them. We really wanted to explore that.'

'It would have to be shot differently,' Wernick said of the -and-gore restrictions that would also need to be taken into consideration. 'It’s funny; you write action and you write gore and you write horror and it’s all how it's shot, how it’s presented. You can write it as graphic as you want, it’s just [up to the director] to cut away on the gory stuff on TV. Whereas, you would show it with the clown and the mallet in the movie, where the squirts all over the place.'

'We always thought [it should be a TV series],' Reese added, saying that the duo have pages of still-unused ideas at this point, waiting to be dusted off for future Zombieland storylines. 'If you watch the movie with that in mind, you will see some remnants of the television show. We have the ‘Zombie Kill of the Week,’ which was always intended to happen every week. The movie ends on a cliffhanger; it doesn’t have a real resolution. [The movie’s ending] is just our guys driving off into the sunset for some new adventures. That’s because, that’s how the television pilot ended.'"