No doubt intended to coincide with the forthcoming summer release of the troubled big-budget movie with Brad Pitt, the audio book adaptation of Max Brooks‘ best-selling horror classic World War Z is getting an expanded release this year, and the project is attracting some major celebrity names to the fold – including a few surprises.

World War Z: The Complete Edition will include five more hours of stories from Brooks’ highly influential book that has been considered to be one of the greatest stories of apocalyptic zombie terror ever told. Among the new cast members lending their voices to this unabridged version will be actor and rapper Common (American Gangster), actor Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2), writer-director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), Firefly/Castle star Nathan Fillion, actor/screenwriter Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead), and most surprisingly of all, Oscar-winner and filmmaking giant Martin Scorsese.

According to the L.A. Times’ Hero Complex blog, Scorsese, the director of such classics of American cinema as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Goodfellas, will play “Breck Scott, a corrupt pharmaceutical developer who sells the American public on a placebo he claims will cure the zombie disease”. Anyone who has had the pleasure of listening to Scorsese speak in interviews, award speeches, or on Blu-ray audio commentaries could say that this role fits him like a glove. The director has spellbinded the major studios into financing some of his more polarizing films in the past, so he would have no problem making us believe he had the cure-all to end the zombie plague.

An abridged audio book was first released in 2007 and has since sold over 115,000 copies. The voice cast included Carl and Rob Reiner, Alan Alda, Mark Hamill, Henry Rollins, and John Turturro. Brooks himself played the role of the Interviewer, a part which he will reprise for the recording of the new material.

World War Z the movie, which does not bear any resemblance to the complex, multi-character, oral history narrative of the book, will open on June 21, 2013. World War Z: The Complete Edition audio book will be released on May 14, 2013, and is available for pre-order now.

[Source: Los Angeles Times]