Brad Pitt zombiepocalyptic 'World War Z' reveals big book-to-screen change, release date

If there are two things that have proven to do pretty well at the box office, it's zombies and Brad Pitt.

Hollywood is combining them in the film adaptation of World War Z, an upcoming post-apocalyptic flick based on Max Brooks's best-selling novel.

According to Cinema Blend, superstar Pitt plays a crusading journalist who lives through a zombie apocalypse and sets out to record the tales of other survivors.

The Marc Forester-directed epic has been garnering buzz since it began production, but a couple of notable news bits dropped this week that have the film back on pop culture's radar.

First, producers at Paramount unveiled a release date -- the highly coveted December 2012. Cinema Blend reports that this will pit the gritty flick against other anticipated efforts like Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and Peter Jackson's long-awaited The Hobbit.

In a similarly risky move, Paramount revealed a major plot device change in its big screen version. Slash Film says that while the novel is told from multiple points of view in a sort of documentary-style prose, the film will be seen solely through Pitt's character's eyes.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the timeline has shifted from after the zombie outbreak to during the zombie outbreak. This significant change is likely to cause a riff between fans of the novel and those eager to see the film, but moviegoers may also consider that Hollywood often pulls these kinds of changes to get the most action possible out of a story line.

What do you think? Should such timeline changes happen in movie adaptations of novels if it means more action and/or screen time of attractive, money-making stars?