Zack Snyder has not made a film since a family tragedy tore him away from work on Justice League in 2017. Now, he's looking to get back behind the camera, and the project he's chosen is one he's been interested in getting made for more than a decade. He'll tackle Army Of The Dead.
Originally talked up when Snyder was deep into making Watchmen, Army was gearing up to be his return to the world of the undead, though not a actual sequel to the Dawn Of The Dead remake that kickstarted his directorial career.
Based on an idea by Snyder, and featuring a script whipped up by Joby Harold, the film finds a young woman headed into a dangerous, quarantined Las Vegas, site of a zombie outbreak, intending to discover the source of the undead problem. When she becomes trapped in the zone, her father assembles a group of mercenaries to help rescue her, with the men tempted by the chance to rob the casinos while they're there.
Netflix has opened its wallet and secured the project away from Warner Bros., where it has sat in development for years. Matthijs Van Heijningen, who made 2011's redo of The Thing was down to direct at one point, Snyder then choosing to simply produce alongside Deborah Snyder, but now he's decided to pick up the reins again. “I thought this was a good palate cleanser to really dig in with both hands and make something fun and epic and crazy and bonkers in the best possible way,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter.
"I love to honor canon and the works of art, but this is the opportunity to find a purely joyful way to express myself though a genre. It will be the most kick-ass, self-aware — but not in a wink-to-the-camera way — balls-to-the-wall zombie freak-show that anyone has ever seen. No one’s ever let me completely loose like this."
With a budget that could hit $90 million, Snyder aims to get production moving this summer. "I love big action, I love big sequences. My movie brain starts clicking around and I was like, 'We need to be shooting this now!' Constructing these sequences really fired me up."
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