The Most Successful Zombie Movie Of All Time

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The fascination with zombies has triggered TV shows, movies, and books. Many people are not sure what a zombie is. Merriam-Webster defines the term as a “will-less and speechless human (as in voodoo belief and in fictional stories) held to have died and been supernaturally reanimated.” The first great zombie movie is usually pegged as “The Night of The Living Dead” released in 1968. It has triggered several sequels. The most recent, “Night of the Living Dead II”, will be released next year.

Box Office Mojo looked at what it calls the “Zombie” genre. The most successful by far is “World War Z” released in 2013 by Paramount. It has a lifetime gross in the U.S. and Canada of $202,359,711. The worldwide ticket sales push the total to $540,455,876. The film took $190,000,000 to make. Box Office Mojo describes its plot as an attempt to “stop a zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and governments and threatens to destroy humanity itself.”

“World War Z” has an advantage over most zombie movies–beyond its huge budget. It starred one of Hollywood’s most successful male stars–Brad Pitt in the lead role of the character Gerry Lane, a former United Nations employee. Pitt has been in 84 movies and won two Oscars. According to The Numbers, the box office ticket sales for his movies are already $5,080,289,600. “World War Z” has been so successful that it has been turned into a video game.

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“World War Z” has had mixed reviews. Its Rotten Tomato score is 66 out of 100. MetaCritic gives it a score of 63%. And IMDb rates it a 7 out of 10. Movie critic Roger Ebert’s review is fairly typical among critics. Writing about director Marc Forster, he comments: “Forster deserves credit, I guess, for finding a way to make a PG-13 zombie movie without totally softening it.”

The reviews did not matter. Pitt and Forster were able to pad their already large bank accounts.

Click here to read The Best Horror Movies Ever Made

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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