‘World War Z’ draws massive crowd in NYC

The 49-year old actor took his time to talk to reporters on the appropriately-designed “Z-shaped” red carpet, often breaking away to sign autographs and pose for photographs with fans.

“We’re not doing this small … we’re going big this summer,” Pitt said of the premiere that resembled a music festival. The film opens Friday in metro Atlanta.

Pitt stars in and produced the apocalyptic thriller based on the book by Max Brooks. He’s the son of the legendary Mel Brooks.

Pitt plays a former United Nations investigator who traverses the world in a race against time to stop a zombie pandemic that is threatening to decimate humanity. “We liked this idea of taking a genre and using that as, I guess, a metaphor for pandemics, and what if one of these pandemics jumped the tracks. Would we be ready? What countries would be in better shape, what countries would take the biggest hit,” Pitt said of the zombie thriller.

While Pitt sees the film as more of a summer thriller than a cautionary tale, he’s nonetheless intrigued by the political subtext.

“A movie is only good if it speaks about our time, if it’s personal in some way, and it plugs into the zeitgeist to irritate a little bit. I think we got that here,” he said.