Brad Pitt is now officially attached to star in the lead of the movie adaptation of Max Brooks’ novel ‘World War Z’. His company Plan B has optioned the book for quite some time now with Marc Foster ready to direct, but now we know Pitt is playing the lead. Word comes straight from the author himself thanks to MTV which also reports that Paramount has set a summer 2012 release for the project.

It’s time the zombie subgenre was given a big budget movie led by a major star and the literary source here is of quality. There’s definitely potential here for a great movie and I’m sure Paramount sees this as its next tentpole. The book itself is not just another zombie attack novel but a proper epic account of a fiction zombie war.

Read the book’s synopsis after the jump:

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?

Natalie Portman has signed on to star and produce in the adaptation with Richard Kelly (The Box, Donnie Darko) set to produce too. Another producer on the film tells Variety:

Natalie and I are longtime passionate fans of Jane Austen’s books and this a fresh, fun and thought-provoking way to approach her work. The idea of zombies running rampant in 19th Century England may sound odd, but it lends a modern sense of urgency to a well known love story.

I haven’t read the novel although the idea is hilariously original and I can’t wait to see what they do with it. David O Russel is rumored to direct, but nothing is confirmed.

Next up: World War Z.

I can’t wait for the movie to release in the UAE and you bet I’ll be the first one to watch it.

More hilariously educational banners after the jump!