Marc Forster

Paramount has set Quantum of Solace director Marc Forster to helm “World War Z,” based on the Max Brooks bestselling novel about a worldwide infestation of flesh eating zombies. This news is a total genre shift for the director whose last couples of movies have been beautiful.

Changeling writer J. Michael Straczynski is adapting the screenplay, and Brad Pitt’s Plan B is producing the film.

Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft and wrote detailed tale in which a researcher for the U.N. Postwar Commission interviews survivors from countries all over the world, 10 years after the crisis, to gather a first person post mortem on a war that obliterated every country on the map.

Forster is unlikely to return for another James Bond installment. As for “WWZ,” “The genre always fascinated me, and when they pitched it to me, it reminded me of the paranoid conspiracy films of the ’70s like ‘All the President’s Men,’ ” Forster told Daily Variety.

Paramount bought the book for Plan B in 2006, and it is one of several high profile projects for the company headed by Pitt, who next stars for the studio in the David Fincher directed The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Plan B is also preparing for the adaptation of the novel “Eat, Pray, Love,” with Ryan Murphy directing and Julia Roberts is expected to star in the film; the Fincher directed projects The Killer and Black Hole; and a film about drug addiction based on two nonfiction tales: “Beautiful Boy” and “Tweak”

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