Acclaimed director James Gunn stated he loved the original Night of the Living Dead.
While retaining only the original film concept, Gunn and Snyder provided a ton of ingenuity to their remake - Hollywood studios were going for more faithful remakes, no less. As it turns out, that was a choice of Gunn's when he was hired to write a draft for the remake.
In a Twitter thread, Gunn stated that he was such a fan of the seminal zombie movie that he thought, "why redo it?" "So we took the mall & the zombies & that’s about it as far as plot goes," Gunn continued. "I just thought, what’s another way this could go?" Furthermore, Gunn tweeted how the remake wasn't initially well-received by the online horror fan community; there was an online petition with "hundreds of thousands of names," and the writer also received a death threat.
Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary was ed on replacing Gunn when he began to bouth Gunn's script to Ain't It Cool News. When the site's editor, and ringleader of what Gunn describes as the "anti-Dawn-remake fervor," Harry Knowles finally relented, read the script, and said it was great, the naysayers backed down. Gunn's "life became normal again." All of this even before Snyder was even brought on to direct.
It's hard to believe such tensions existed behind-the-scenes when the remake was immensely popular among critics and fans. Yet, the odds were stacked against them. Watchmen - a case of a faithful adaptation.
And what of Gunn? As the writer/director stated himself, he was an avid fan of the genre and the remake. Guardians of the Galaxy, his introduction to the MCU. Any writer/director can have the skills and experience to make any film, but it's the ion that drives its success, and Dawn of the Dead is filled to brim with it.
Source: James Gunn/Twitter
