Terrifying chances that World War Z could happen in real life as a sequel finally moves forward

While zombie movies were once confined to the slow-moving shufflers of George A. Romero's ..of the Dead series, there's been a boom in 'fast' zombies.

The trend was largely spurred on by 2002's 28 Days Later, but alongside Train to Busan, I Am Legend, and the Resident Evil movies, Marc Forster's World War Z is a fan-favorite.

Hollywood continues to impress by tinkering with the zombie genre in everything from The Last of Us to 28 Years Later, and now, World War Z is making a comeback.

The original movie soared to the top of the charts in 2013, and as well as boasting a 72% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, it made an impressive $540 million.

Despite reports that Forster and Paramount Pictures viewed World War Z as a trilogy based on Max Brooks' wildly different 2006 book of the same name, plans for a sequel fell apart.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom's J. A. Bayona was originally slated to direct, but after things stalled in 2016, World War Z 2 fell into development hell.

The legendary David Fincher joined the project in 2017, with Brad Pitt due to reprise his role as Gerry Lane. Paramount pulled the plug again due to whispers that the Chinese government's ban on movies featuring zombies or ghosts was a deciding factor.

Things went quiet until August 2025, with an $8 billion merger between Paramount and Skydance reviving the idea after the success of the Pitt-led F1.

As things finally look like they're rumbling forward on the next World War Z, timing couldn't be better to look back at a 2013 Empire article where medical experts explained whether the movie's outbreak could happen in real life.

Notably, epidemiologist George Truman claims the rapid pace at which the zombie virus spreads is unrealistic. World War Z has people becoming zombies 12 seconds after infection, and assuming there’s a 100% transmission rate through bites, he’s used a model to figure out its spread. Taking into account the US population in 2013 being 313 million, Truman claimed it would take a week to infect the entirety of the United States. Still, the movie doesn't get everything right.

Truman notes the iconic airplane infection scene likely wouldn't work out as it did: "Given the 12-second incubation period, an already infected person would have to board the plane in his/her zombie state, presumably biting people on the way and infecting everyone on board and in the airport.

“Surely this would only happen once before airlines/governments would shut down operations and stop international travel."

With the pilots presumably eventually being bitten, the plane would likely crash and eliminate the virus. He also added: "I'm not sure how the outbreak would have spread from Taiwan to South Korea without alerting authorities around the world, and travel stopping at that stage. But that would have been a very short and dull movie."

In terms of the ending where Gerry infects himself with typhoid as a way to become immune to the zombies' attacks, the article concluded that while it's a great plot device, it is "unlikely to occur at the macro level". Truman concludes: "How does the zombie know that someone has cancer, for example? This is a particularly ridiculous and unrealistic scenario and convenient for the plot to move forward/ I much prefer the method used in The Walking Dead: covering yourself with dead zombie mush and walk like a zombie through the zombie crowd, hoping like hell it doesn't rain."

We have enough things to worry about without World War Z coming to life, but let's see if the sequel is full of more scientific foreshadowing.