The movie Brad Pitt said put a “big bullseye on my back”
Even though he’s spent decades as one of the biggest names in Hollywood, Brad Pitt has maintained that A-list status without dipping his toes into the arena of blockbuster cinema all too often.
He’s made plenty of films with huge budgets, but in terms of productions designed specifically to serve as crowd-pleasing exhibitions of escapism, his credits are few and far between. Outside of the Ocean’s trilogy, only Troy, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, World War Z, and Bullet Train have ticked that box in the last 20 years as live-action movies where the two-time Academy Award winner plays a leading role.
They all did decent business at the box office, too, but one of them stands out as one of the most nightmarish productions in recent history. Marc Forster’s adaptation of Max Brooks’ novel went massively over budget and was subjected to extensive rewrites and reshoots, leaving many to believe World War Z was destined to flop.
Instead, it ended up as the highest-grossing release of Pitt’s entire career and the top-earning entry in the history of the zombie subgenre, but it wasn’t easy to get there. In fact, the actor was surprisingly honest in his assessment of the first cut before the team reassembled to whip it back into shape, describing it as “just atrocious”.
“You see some first cuts and you go, ‘Oh, it’s everything you want it to be and more’,” Pitt said to USA Today. “It’s working on certain levels that you didn’t even understand when you were shooting it. Like, I had this feeling seeing Moneyball. And here was the exact opposite”. At the time, Pitt didn’t even seem entirely sure if World War Z was even salvageable.
“Our summation of the thing was just a complete failure,” he continued. “You develop this sense I guess as you get on in your years, and we all knew. We just didn’t know how much it would smell. And it was pretty rank”. Fortunately, audiences disagreed, and the end product avoided a critical pasting, too, underlining that huge movies being completely overhauled late in the day isn’t always a death sentence.
Not that he wasn’t nervous beforehand, though, admitting that “because of me, there’s a big bullseye on my back”. Calling World War Z “a big, big bet with a lot of money on the table” after its production costs swelled to a figure estimated to be over $250 million, Pitt acknowledged how he “didn’t understand how technically sharp you have to be to pull off some of that stuff”.
It worked out fine in the end for the star and producer, but there was evidently a period before the reshoots where Pitt was seriously concerned that not only was World War Z destined for inevitable failure, but he’d be held accountable when it happened.
