I suppose we will see but all signs point to this being a "John Carter".
If we go in with the assumption that the $370 million is accurate then we can, up front, total 370 + 370/2 for production and release costs before taking into account that if they are dumping a huge chunk into running a production schedule that bleeds into their re-shoots then they are trying to get the movie out and into theaters as quickly as possible which makes sense from an accounting perspective. So, historically, we end up with a situation where the studio is either going to augment the 70/30 split with theaters in order to entice them to show this on more screens during the day or give a much larger percentage to them to show a bunch of future crap movies while maintaining the 70/30 split for WWZ. Either way they have just increased the distribution costs for their movie beyond the norms of internet math.
Assuming straight forward numbers and bad internet maths we'd get ($370mil + $370mil/2) / .7 = 792857142.8571429 as the flat box office take required to break even on a movie where no distribution deal was in place
Going with $200mil ($170 initial production costs and $30mil re-shoots) ($200mil + $200mil/2) / .7 = 428571428.5714286, over double the box office of Pitts highest grossing movie to date just to break even (without distribution deal)
Even taking inflation into account this movie needs to gross more than $200mil more than Mr. and Mrs. Smith to break even
I guess all that I can say is that I hope that you are right sir. Without people like Pitt and whomever greenlit this taking chances like WWZ we are going to be stuck with the same regurgitated plots and the perpetual sequel machine that we are now seeing in the video game industry. Logically I'm seeing, best case scenario, that the exec that ok'd funding for this as well as Plan B Entertainment are out of the picture after this loses $200mil. Worst case, Paramount becomes a non-entity after taking a $600mil loss. Either way, we've effectively seen the studio lose its ability to make movies similar to this in the future.
An end note, I understand that this is not the book. This is definitely one of those books that cannot be transferred over to film (without the mini-series aspect that others in this thread have already brought up). This is very much a Robbins, Vonnegut, Dostoevsky or Burroughs type story (and I am not equating Brooks to those other authors, Brooks is a pretty shit author considering writing style and subject, he just hit upon a fad that was just kicking into gear when he wrote his zombie books). Things are disjointed and we get to make most of our connections through the limitations of prose. It is interesting to see where they are trying to take the story, although with Lindelof involved I think that even that is going to be a cluster-fuck, and it makes more sense for the medium rather than convoluting everything trying to incorporate all of the individual chapters.