'Zombieland' Amazon series canceled

Zombieland was initially meant to be a TV show , then it gained life as a movie franchise, but hope for a sequel died and then the TV show was reanimated as an Amazon series ... and now that, too, is undead.

Co-creator Rhett Reese tweeted last night that "Our Zombieland  series will not be moving forward on Amazon. Sad for everyone involved."

Reese and Paul Wernick co-wrote the 2009 movie and the Amazon series pilot which became available online for free viewing less than a month ago. The idea of the Amazon pilot was that fan support would lead to a series pick-up. And to be fair, the series averaged 3 1/2 out of five stars from more than five thousand reviews.

Still, Reese said, "I'll never understand the vehement hate the pilot received from die-hard Zombieland  fans. You guys successfully hated it out of existence."

The biggest complaint about the pilot was that it was, as Entertainment Weekly phrased, a "bargain-basement knockoff" of the movie with the new actors embodying the same characters and that, "You feel like you’re watching a smudged Xerox of what was a pretty hilarious movie."



But in our interview with Reese and Wernick last month, they defended the decision to keep the same characters from the movie, despite the inevitable comparisons to actors like Woody Harrelson.

"To us, Zombieland  really is these characters," Reese told Paranormal Pop Culture.

"We always loved these characters. You know, they were the reason we wrote the movie in the first place ... We didn't want to create a bunch of new characters. Now obviously what that then created was this, you know, comparison between new cast and old cast which I think is -- we think is incredibly unfair in the sense that, you know, obviously our first cast was tremendous."

Reese also notes that the show's character of Tallahassee, played by Harrelson in the movie and Kirk Ward in the pilot, was always meant to be portrayed by Ward.

So what do you think? Did you want to take another undead roadtrip to Zombieland  or were you happy to see it go?

-Aaron Sagers