'World War Z' has succeeded because it failed completely

'World War Z' failure is a success

After 'World War Z' starring Brad Pitt earned a spectacular $66 million weekend, the bigger question on our minds is "How on earth did this movie become Brad Pitt's biggest box office opening ever, after facing endless disasters while being made?"

Brad Pitt this week described the first cut of the film as "Just atrocious". Paramount's epic zombie blockbuster faced months of problems. The shoot was deemed "..a complete failure". It was quite possibly Brad Pitt's "last stand", and Marc Forster's last ever movie.

However, despite the troubles 'World War Z' had during production, one area where the film has triumphed is making people aware of how badly it failed. Up until the re-writes and the "emergency surgery" needed to bring this beast of a movie to the screen, we had been inundated with the message that this film will fail, spectacularly. Yet, we have been so intrigued by its failure that it has actually out-performed 'Mr And Mrs Smith' starring Pitt and Angelina Jolie back in 2005. Pitt is now at the height of his career at the box office from what many could have only predicted would be his fall into the abyss.

Additionally, we saw most recently how Steven Spielberg and George Lucas predicted box office doom for high budget blockbusters, that would lead to a film industry implosion where tickets in the future would be sold for $50 or more. Days later, Paramount announced a $50 mega ticket that was part of that very same debate. This added to the hype that 'World War Z' would face disaster because no-one would pay that much for a ticket, nor want to see this movie.

Despite all that, 'World War Z' has been trending on Twitter in the past few days, and the discussion around it has gone viral. Most of us believed that this film was heading for a write off and a self-implosion. Even while that idea was being discussed on the social web the film's main star, Brad Pitt, was also amplifying it by saying it had failed badly during filming. Thanks to that effort, we have also been bemused by his honesty, which is quite a role-reversal when you think of how a star should promote a movie (in a positive sense, not a negative).

At the end of the day 'World War Z' has divided critics, but united audiences. We would have surely seen a different box office result if it hadn't been so controversial. Have you seen 'World War Z'?