With the news cycle taking a hit thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic essentially closing down Hollywood, a lot of filmmakers have been using social media to interact with fans and share some cool behind the scenes stories. Now, Zombieland co-writer Paul Wernick has taken to Twitter to share some excerpts from earlier drafts of the screenplay featuring alternate cameos!
As you'll no doubt recall (and the banner image above should help), Ghostbusters star Bill Murray made a memorable and hilarious cameo in the 2009 release which saw him pose as a zombie...and then get taken out by Jesse Eisenberg's Columbus.
According to Wernick, Star Wars legend Mark Hamill was also considered for a sequence which would have seen a zombified version of the actor attempt to kill Columbus before getting into a lightsaber duel with Tallahassee. The fight would have ended with him cutting off Hamill's hand in a very obvious nod to what happened at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.
Honestly, it sounds both wacky and a little silly, but it was clearly a very early idea, and one that was only considered because, "we would have never in our wildest imagination thought we could get [Bill Murray]."
Other celebrity cameos considered included Patrick Swayze, Sylvester Stallone, Joe Pesci, Kevin Bacon, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Matthew McConaughey, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. They were clearly just throwing ideas around at a very early stage in development, but any one of those would have been undeniably fun to see.
Murray returned in Zombieland: Double Tap for a flashback sequence, but there weren't any celebrity cameos beyond that (which feels like a real missed opportunity based on this news).
Check out our exclusive interview with Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson in the player below!