The most expensive horror movie of all time isn’t even that scary

Although 2013s Brad Pitt Vehicle World War p Was the most expensive horror movie ever made, the zombie action thriller isn’t particularly scary. Big budgets can be both a blessing and a curse for horror movies. On the one hand, bigger budgets theoretically mean more money for special effects. This means that the monsters and the murders can be more inventive and realistic, which is generally seen as a good thing. After all, nothing sinks a good horror movie quite like hilariously unconvincing, cheap special effects. However, there is another side to this equation that makes high-budget horror high risk.

Since even great horror movies can bomb at the box office, it’s always risky when an entry in the genre becomes very expensive. The bigger a movie’s budget, the more viewers it must attract. Horror’s intensity puts many viewers off the genre altogether, while the genre’s extreme often preludes younger viewers from watching its movies. Thus, big-budget horror movies usually need to tone down the scares and the violence to attract big box office paydays. The result is box office bombs that kill horror franchises since, ironically, they are too big and expensive to feel like real horror movies.

World War Z had a budget of around $190 million

The 2013 zombie movie was extremely expensive for a “horror”

Although 2013s World War p It wasn’t a box office failure, the apocalyptic zombie horror was notably non-scary. An adaptation of the 2006 novel of the same name, World War p Tells the story of Brad Pitt’s Gary Lane, a U.N. Investigator tackling a worldwide zombie apocalypse. With a budget of approximately $190 million (which was rumored to have grown even higher), World War p Earned $540 million upon release. Despite this, the movie never received a sequel or spawned a franchise. This is at least partly because, for all of his budget, World War p Wasn’t remotely scary.

World War pThe world-hopping zombie story has some moments of moderate tension and some minimal gore, but the movie was more concerned with large-scale action set-boards than generating genuine scares. Pitt’s hero is never in real danger during his druggy runtime, though World War pThe family-friendly PG-13 rating means the movie rarely gets cruel. Compared to the boundary-pushing small-screen series The Walking Dead, World War p Felt more like an international thriller than a zombie horror. This is not helped by a surprisingly optimistic ending that, along with the lack of serious scares, made World War p Feel disappointed anodyne.

World War Z isn’t even that scary compared to other zombie movies

The military action of World War Z cannot be compared to 28 days later or Romero’s movies

World War p had the misfortune to arrive after a string of truly scary zombie moviesWhich made its shortcomings as a horror movie more obvious. World War p Could have been a survival thriller, but director Danny Boyle’s seminal smash hit 28 days later Only a decade earlier had offered viewers an era-defining zombie movie. Even World War p‘s better extended cut never came close to matching the intensity of 28 days later or its sequel 28 weeks laterAnd this issue is compounded by their plot similarities.

Both thE 28 days later Movies and World War p Focused on military responses to zombie outbreaks, but only the first franchise could turn the material into something terrifying. To make matters worse for World War pZack Snyder S Dawn of the Dead Remake provided a much scarier, greasier and uncomfortable zombie apocalypse in 2004. World War pSnyder S Dawn of the Dead gave viewers a look at the frenetic outbreak of a zombie apocalypse. However, this earlier zombie horror was immeasurably more effective, much like 28 days later.

World War Z is more of an action movie than a horror movie

The horror elements of World War Z are consistently downplayed

Although David Fincher’s canceled World War II Could have fixed this issue, the biggest problem with the zombie thriller was primarily one of tone. World War p was more of an action movie than a horror movieAlthough his monsters are zombies. Much like Zombieland Throwing a sweet rom-com storyline at the shambling corpse of the zombie horror sub-genre, World War p Added zombies to a jet-setting military thriller. The problem was that this approach made Pitt’s hero too safe.

Viewers couldn’t help but be convinced that Pitt’s well-equipped, highly-trained former U.N. Advisor is in no real danger World War ps history. This would do well in an ordinary action thriller, where the quick-thinking heroism of the protagonist is the main appeal of the movie. however, World War p Was apparently a horror movie. The adaptation was short lived since, despite his giant body count, there was never a sense of real danger in his action movie plot. how so World War ps failure to set Brad Pitts main character in danger resulted in a horror movie that was very expensive, but hardly scary.