THE MEG 2 Director Ben Wheatley Developing His Satirical Zombie Series GENERATION Z
Director Ben Wheatley, whose most recent film The Meg 2: The Trench is now in theaters, is developing a new satirical zombie series project titled Generation Z.
Wheatley originally planned on developing Generation Z back in 2019 for Channel 4 in the UK and it was said to feature “rapacious baby boomers and disaffected teenagers at each other’s throats.” The filmmaker described it as a ”zombie drama satirizing intergenerational divides in the UK.” After the pandemic hit, the project was shelved.
He’s now dusting off the project and says this is going to be the next project he develops: “What I’m doing next is six hours for Channel 4, [a] TV series, a horror-based thing […] In the same way I did In The Earth after Rebecca, I’ll do something that’s back to [the] Kill List-y, Sightseers-y world.”
This is going to be a fun project! Wheatly tends to make entertaining films and I enjoyed the hell out of The Meg 2. The previously released full synopsis of Generation Z reads:
The future looks bleak for today’s youth – seemingly-endless austerity, astronomical house prices, insurmountable student debt, a political system which appears intent on destroying itself… And to add insult to injury, their hard-earned taxes are being eaten up by the old – smug, self-satisfied, small-minded, “Little Englander” pensioners whose remaining sole purpose in life is to make it a misery for everyone else.
In a small British town, tensions come to a head when a mysterious military convoy crashes outside the Sunnywise Retirement Home. The vehicles were carrying a toxic substance, which, as a result of the crash, leaks into the local environment and infects the residents of the retirement community. The symptoms of this infection quickly manifest – an overwhelming appetite for raw flesh. They’re old, they’re angry and they’re on the rampage. As the military scrambles to control the outbreak and keep everything out of the media spotlight, a group of regular teenagers find themselves in the thick of the battle against these flesh-eating baby boomers.
Wheatley also said that he’d like to work on another big-budget monster movie, and specifically mentions a Kaiju movie, which would be cool!