In May 2012, production returned to Budapest for seven weeks of additional shooting. The following month, screenwriter Damon Lindelof was hired to rewrite the film's third act with reshoots scheduled to begin in September or October 2012. However Lindelof, who also reworked Prometheus and co-wrote Star Trek Into Darkness, did not have time to script the new ending and in July 2012, Paramount hired Lindelof's Lost partner, Drew Goddard. Lindelof explained there were inefficiencies in the script in relation to the shooting, which started before the script was finalized thus making the ending "abrupt and incoherent" and was missing a large chunk of footage. Lindelof presented two options to executives, who ultimately chose to shoot 30 to 40 minutes of additional footage to make a coherent ending. The re-shoots coupled with other overages caused the budget to balloon to around $190 million, which shocked Paramount president Marc Evans. Several of the scenes shot in Budapest, including a large-scale battle with the zombies in Moscow's Red Square, were dropped from the final cut in order to water down the film's political undertones, and steer it towards a more generally friendly summer blockbuster. The climactic battle scene in Russia, for which there was 12 minutes of footage, had Pitt's character fighting through zombies more like "a warrior hero" than "the sympathetic family man" of the earlier acts. The second-unit director, Simon Crane, said, "It wasn't character-driven anymore... [The filmmakers] really needed to think about what they wanted to do with the third act."
