Although the press release doesn’t mention their names, the original script was  written by Michael Weiss and Gregg Ostrin for Amazon’s annual slate of film-writing contests. At Amazon Studios, you can watch an animated test movie version of Zombies vs. Gladiators or download a copy of the original script.

Barker had this statement: “I’m excited by the opportunity to interweave two very rich narrative threads. One of them concerns itself with the reality of the decadence of Rome and its rise and fall. The other is a fantastical narrative element – the living dead. My brief to myself on this project is to give the audience not only zombies they have never seen before but also a Rome they have never seen before … In twenty-five years of working in this town, I’ve rarely had people listen to what I had to say as closely and as carefully as they did and then simply give me the freedom to go do it.”

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