Zombies take over the planet, Will Smith won't be saving the world again and Jim Carrey has issues with Kick-Ass 2 .
• World War Z has defied the prophets of doom to post a very strong opening weekend, taking $111.8 million worldwide (with $66 million in the US). According to The Hollywood Reporter , that's probably going to be good enough box office to get Paramount to bite on a sequel. WWZ wasn't the biggest success story of the weekend, however – Pixar prequel Monsters University opened with $82 million in the US. (It opens in the UK in July).
• We may have just had confirmation that we'll be seein g a sequel to Independence Day in 2015 , but it seems the original's chief action man Will Smith won't be in it. "Will Smith cannot come back because he's too expensive, but he'd also be too much of a marquee name," director Roland Emmerich told the New York Daily News . "We have like maybe half of the people that you would know from the first film [in the script] and the other half people who are new."
• Jim Carrey has taken to Twitter to withdraw his support for Kick-Ass 2 , the upcoming sequel where he plays vigilante Colonel Stars and Stripes, saying that the Sandy Hook school shootings have changed his outlook on screen violence. "I did Kickass a month b4 Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence. My apologies to others involve[d] with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart."
Mark Millar, the creator of the original Kick-Ass comic book, has since responded on his blog . "As you may know, Jim is a passionate advocate of gun-control and I respect both his politics and his opinion, but I'm baffled by this sudden announcement as nothing seen in the picture wasn't in the screenplay eighteen months ago. Yes, the body-count is very high, but a movie called Kick-Ass 2 really has to do what it says on the tin. A sequel to the picture that gave us Hit-Girl was always going to have some blood on the floor and this should have been no shock to a guy who enjoyed the first movie so much.
"Ironically Jim's character in Kick-Ass 2 is a Born Again Christian and the big deal we made of the fact that he refuses to fire a gun is something he told us attracted him to the role in the first place."
• Genre regular William Fichtner has confirmed to Huffington Post Canada that he'll be playing Shredder in Michael Bay's upcoming Ninja Turtles reboot. "I play Shredder," he said. "It is cool. It's one of those things that came along where I thought, 'Really? Let me think about this for a minute.' Then I was like, 'Yeah, OK, this sounds like a journey.' I'm very glad that it worked out, I'm really glad that I'm doing it."
• The former Governor of California's return to acting continues apace. Variety is reporting that Arnold Schwarzenegger will star in and produce zombie drama Maggie .
• And a few new pics from The Conjuring have been released. James "Insidious" Wan's ghostly horror arrives in UK cinemas on Friday 2 August.
