Movies like World War Z

If you want that globe-spanning outbreak narrative with urgent geopolitical stakes, you're most likely to find it in Contagion, which traces the same investigative race against exponential spread with documentary precision, or The Winter Hunger, which mirrors the relentless pacing and mutating-plague-across-continents structure almost beat-for-beat. If you're after the intimate human stakes layered over systemic collapse, Train to Busan and Generation Z both use zombie chaos as pressure cookers for impossible moral choices, though they compress the scale from global to personal in ways that shift the whole emotional weight. 28 Days Later and Peninsula probably come closest to matching both the viral outbreak mechanics and the survival-horror urgency, but neither quite captures that particular blend of investigative procedural + world-ending threat that makes World War Z distinctive.