Here's every one of Zack Snyder's upcoming movies and TV shows. There are few mainstream directors making films either as polarizing or visually distinctive as Snyder right now. Most/all of his comic book superhero adaptation inspire just as much fierce criticism as they do impassioned defenses and praise, and even his non-superhero offerings (like Sucker Punch) have typically given rise to an equally divided response. One imagines Snyder tends to expect as much going in: when you decide to adapt landmark stories like Watchmen or re-imagine Superman's origin story for the 21st century (and them pair him off against Batman), you just know you're going to be stepping on some toes.
While he's rarely one to shy away from controversial or challenging subject matter, there have been a few occasions where even Snyder decided his projects were a little too volatile to carry on through to fruition. Most notably, the filmmaker raised more than a few eyebrows when he revealed his plans to turn writer Ayn Rand's infamous ode to Objectivism, the 1943 novel The Fountainhead, into a movie (and, later, a miniseries) in 2016. In a wise decision, he's shifted the project over to the back-burner until further notice, citing the present political climate as a major motivating factor in his decision.
Even with that, Snyder currently has a handful of projects in active development, many of which are going to premiere as streaming exclusives. Here's everything on his docket at the moment, including a slower-developing passion project that Snyder may or may not return to in the foreseeable future.
The problems of Justice League have already been heavily documented, but here's a refresher: when Snyder's second DCEU movie, 2016's Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, proved to be even more polarizing than his first one, 2013's Man of Steel, it understandably left Warner Bros. in a state of panic. The studio was already gearing up to begin production on Snyder's Justice League a few weeks after that and had announced the director would return for Justice League 2, so they couldn't really stop the train at that point. After Snyder turned in his initial cut of the film and stepped down during post-production (in the wake of a personal tragedy) in early 2017, WB turned to Avengers director Joss Whedon to write and oversee heavy reshoots of their own superhero crossover event. The resulting theatrical cut was widely perceived as a Frankenstein's monster of a movie, and many Snyder fans subsequently started petitioning for the release of the director's initial version of the DCEU team-up.
Everyone will get to see what that looks like when Zack Snyder's Justice League officially begins streaming on HBO Max in 2021. With reports that Whedon filmed as much as 80 pages of new material for Justice League, the Snyder Cut could end up looking and feeling like a completely different thing. It's also confirmed to include subplots largely or entirely dropped from the theatrical version, including much of Cyborg's story thread and the introduction of the DC super-villain Darkseid. Tonally, Zack Snyder's Justice League ought to hew pretty closely to the operatic vibe and grandiose scope of his other DCEU films, but hopefully with the rich narrative development many feel make his Ultimate Edition of Batman V Superman superior to the shorter theatrical edit. And speaking of runtime: this new version of Justice League will be so long (maybe as much as four hours), it could end up releasing as either two feature-length movies or a miniseries.
Four years after making his feature directorial debut on 2004's Dawn of the Dead remake, Snyder planned to return to the zombie genre with Army of the Dead, an original zombie action movie he had intended to produce only, with Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. (The Thing 2011) directing. The project nearly began shooting in 2009 before Warner Bros. pulled the plug, citing concerns about the film's growing budget at the time when the 2007 financial crisis was still a recent event. It's probably for the best too: in its previous form, the Army of the Dead script included elements like an exploitative (and tasteless) subplot involving male zombies raping human women to create human-zombie hybrids. Ten years later, Netflix acquired the rights to the movie from WB and set Snyder to direct from the new script draft he'd written with Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum) and Joby Harold (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword).
Plot-wise, Army of the Dead 2.0 will follow a group of mercenaries as they try to execute a heist on a Las Vegas casino after the city has been overrun with zombies and quarantined from the rest of the world. It's the latest Netflix Original movie to revolve around a diverse team of operatives carrying out covert missions after Michael Bay's 6 Underground and Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Old Guard, so the question is whether the combination of Snyder's visual flair and zombies will be enough to make Army of the Dead feel like more than just the latest addition to what has curiously become the streaming service's brand of action-thriller. As for the theory the film could be a stealth sequel to Dawn of the Dead... well, if it is, it's best to not expect the pair to be anything but loosely connected. (That's assuming Snyder isn't taking a leaf out of M. Night Shymalan's Unbreakable playbook and sneakily setting up a trilogy of his own making.)
Even with two films in post-production and possibly launching very soon (Army of the Dead doesn't have an official release date, but it's rumored to arrive as early as late 2020), Snyder is lending his talents to another upcoming Netflix project. An untitled anime series based in the world of Norse mythology, the show will reunite the filmmaker with his frequent storyboard artist Jay Oliva and promises to bring "the iconic characters and stories of Norse mythology to life in [Snyder's] inimitable style," according to Netflix head of anime programming John Derderian. So, for anyone who's ever wanted to see the ancient mythological characters that inspired Marvel's Thor in their original forms and brought to life via animation that recalls the vibrant - and violent - style of the 300 movies (especially 300: Rise of an Empire, which Oliva did storyboard work on and Snyder co-wrote), this is one to keep an eye on.
Back in 2019, Snyder informed Comic Book Debate he already has three different projects to choose from for his followup to Army of the Dead (and, as we now know, his cut of Justice League). The first is The Last Photograph, a movie about a wartime photographer who joins forces with a special ops soldier while working in Afghanistan. Snyder has been trying to get the script (which he co-wrote with his 300 and Rise of an Empire co-writer Kurt Johnstad) into production for much of the last ten years, and even had Oscar-winners Christian Bale and Sean Penn loosely attached to star at one point.
Also on his radar is a Napoleon movie written by a friend of his (Snyder didn't name them) and done "in the form of Scarface." This isn't the first time Snyder has expressed interest in making a historical epic based in either the late 18th or early 19th century either, having previously talked about making a 300-style adventure inspired by Emanuel Leutze's famous 1851 painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River with the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War.
Lastly, although he's pushed his adaptation of The Fountainhead to the side, Snyder (by the sound of things) hasn't wholly given up on it, either. As he told CBD, "It’s still important to me, but it’s a really touchy subject right now." He went on to address the original novel's politics, adding "People will think it’s hardcore right wing propaganda, but I don’t view it like that. I just think the story is super fun and crazy and melodramatic about architecture and sex.” Take that as you will.
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July 22, 2020 at 05:55AM
