According to Deadline, the lead has been set for the final installment in George A. Romero’s Living Dead series. Twilight Of The Dead will star Milla Jovovich. The Machinist director Brad Anderson will helm.
The project comes directly from the estate of Romero, working in conjunction with movie financier Roundtable. The script is developed by Joe Knetter, Paolo Zelati, and Robert Lucas from a treatment Romero wrote in 2017 before he died.
This final tale from the post-zombie apocalypse world is set on a tropical island. The last humans alive are caught between two factions of the undead, and the choices they will be forced to make will expose the dark nature of their remaining humanity.
Anderson has said that it will be a firm genre movie in the mood of I Am Legend, The Last of Us, and The Road. Greg Nicotero returns to create the special makeup and effects. Shooting will begin in March, as long as the project is successfully sold at the American Film Market.
The franchise began in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead and arguably hit its high point with 1978s Dawn Of The Dead.
For decades, the canon had the cause of the zombie reanimation being radiation from an exploding space probe returning from Venus. This all changed with The Rise, a prequel comic to Night of the Living Dead written by Romero’s son G. Cameron Romero depicting the origins.
The project was originally intended to be a film, which started as an Indiegogo funding campaign in 2014 for Night of the Living Dead: Origins and later renamed Rise of the Living Dead. It is set at the height of the Cold War era, depicting a military scientist searching for a way to sustain human life in the event of a nuclear holocaust.
This project was eventually dissociated from the franchise by Romero who feared copyright complications and lawsuits.