I enjoyed Marc Forster’s World War Z, but the more I hear about what’s in Max Brooks’ book, the more I wish the writers took a different approach to the big screen rendition.  Even though the film suffered some seriously sour pre-release word-of-mouth courtesy of rewrites, budget troubles and that whole debacle regarding the third act of the film, World War Z still went on to accumulate $540 million at the worldwide box office and earn itself a sequel.

There hasn’t been much movement on the project since Locke director Steven Knight signed on to pen the script, but now he’s talking about it and while he doesn’t confirm he’ll run with long lost elements from the source material, at least he reveals that he’s going in a different direction than the previous film.  Hit the jump for more.

Here’s what Knight told Indiewire (via Empire) about writing the World War Z sequel:

"I thought, 'why not? What fun.' It’s not quite like the other, we're starting with clean slate. When they've signed off we're on.”

Sadly there was no follow-up and the World War Z talk ends there, but the whole “starting with [a] clean slate” thing is promising.  Without Knight’s clarification we can’t know for sure exactly what that means, but Empire suggests that the series could possibly take on an anthology format, and perhaps that means Knight is delving into untapped elements of Brooks’ book.

Hopefully further details from the filmmakers will surface soon so that we can move beyond speculation and get a clearer picture of where they’re heading with the sequel.  World War Z 2 is expected to go into production in October and hit theaters in 2016.