J. Michael Straczynski, the man who made Babylon 5 and now writes some superb comic work, is set to write the adaptation of World War Z by Max Brooks.

The novel is a very clever one and is written from the perspective of a journalistic look back on a past war, interviewing survivors, looking at historical documents, reviewing old interviews, it revisits the rise of a pandemic of Zombification which spread across the world and how the world's governments fought it and ultimately survived.

According to IGN UK who were visiting the New York Comic-Con, Straczynski announced that he's writing the book for Paramount and it may well star Brad Pitt since his production company is backing the film.

"I'm adapting that for Paramount. For Brad Pitt potentially -- we'll see what happens. He might be the star in it. So things are going very well for a TV guy...

...the book, if you haven't read it, is a wonderful, wonderful book in an interview format after the zombie wars...You see how we survived. It's very political, very smart, very cagey, but there's no main character. So you have to create who the interviewer is and give him some background and bring him from place to place to place to place. And they said, 'Feel free to get as political as you want, as incisive as you want, to play with it. You could look at this as a Katrina kind of catastrophe.' But I'm being very faithful to the book, letter by letter when I can, and I'm on about page 70 right now and I'm really happy with it. I'm really pleased with it actually, so if that goes well we might go into production on that one."

Well I've been waiting for Hollywood to pick up JMS in a big way, after all Babylon 5 was a stupendous series and was never really given the backing it deserved, however in an odd way that helped it even more. What I would love to see though is JMS get bigger budget scripts and projects behind him and see what he can produce with some backing, instead of fighting to get each script made.

This looks like a really exciting project, and if his is the final hand on the script, so much the better. The question then is who to direct, and will Pitt really star?