ZOMBIELAND

Zombieland is such a 2009 film. At the time of its release it was the biggest zombie movie ever. Which is wild to think about because of how so-so it is. It’s fun, sure, but it’s very 2009. This is pre-The Walking Dead. It stars Jesse Eisenberg pre-The Social Network. Emma Stone pre-Easy A. Woody Harrelson kicking off another round of ‘How good is Woody Harrelson? He should be in more things’. And Abigail Breslin pre-steady work.

The cast is great, obviously, they’re four actors who are fun to see act. It’s fun to see them in a not-super-serious zombie movie. Except for one actor in the film. Let’s talk about the Bill Murray part. There’s a Bill Murray cameo in Zombieland where the characters go to Bill Murray’s mansion and Bill Murray plays himself. And it sucks.

This movie came out around peak Bill Murray mythology. When every second article on the internet seemed to be about how Bill Murray showed up to somebody’s house party because he was walking past or how he popped into a restaurant ate somebody’s chips and said “nobody will believe you” or about how he got drunk with some random on a night out. And all of these stories were told in a breathless ‘how great is Bill Murray’ kind of way, and not told as though were very sad stories about a famous man with nothing to do.

Bill Murray is a great actor, there’s no dispute from me on that. He’s in great films and he is great in them. But I don’t buy the narrative that follows him around. There’s that story about him only agreeing to be Garfield because he thought that the Joel Cohen who was making the film was Joel Coen of the Coen Brothers. As if that’s not the dumbest thing anybody has ever done. He was also in the sequel. Did he make the same mistake twice? That wasn’t a weird quirky error. He was offered a lot of money and said yes to it and then told a Bill Murray story later on and people loved it.

What would I do if I were in Zombieland? I’d love to think that I too would survive in this post-apocalyptic world and stumble across an out-of-place cameo that could drag my own narrative to a halt. I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of celebrities who occupied an omnipresent space in pop culture that would have resulted with them cameo-ing as themselves in a zombie film. And rather than bumping into Snooki and The Situation in 2009 I thought I’d move the film forward a couple of years. For this exercise let’s not just put me into Zombieland, let’s move Zombieland’s release date to 2011.