Ruben Fleischer’s 2009 zombie film Zombieland is officially getting a sequel, with the director and original cast set to return, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The movie is expected to begin production in January, and hit theaters in October 2019.
Zombieland 2 will reunite Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, and Abigail Breslin, and will reportedly take the group “from the White House to the American heartland as they face off against new kinds of zombies that have evolved since the first movie, as well as some new human survivors.”
The 2009 film was Fleischer’s first, following Columbus (played by Jesse Eisenberg) — the survivors have taken on the names of cities to avoid becoming attached to one another — as he traveled from his college dorm room in Texas to Columbus, Ohio to see if his family was still alive. Along the way, he meets a man calling himself Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), and accompanies him north. The two then meet Wichita (Emma Stone) and her sister Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), and despite their initial distrust of one another, end up going to California to Pacific Playland in Los Angeles, which is supposedly free of the undead.
The film was successful when it hit theaters a decade ago, and at the time, the creators indicated that they had wanted to do a sequel of some sort, but moved on to other projects. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick went on to write Deadpool and Deadpool 2 while director Ruben Fleischer helmed the soon-to-be-released Venom. Sony Pictures planned a television adaptation in 2011 that never materialized, while Amazon Studios developed and released a pilot for the show, but never picked it up for a full series.