Rebel Moon Director Zack Snyder Welcomes Your Inevitable Star Wars Comparisons

It's no secret that Zack Snyder's upcoming big-budget Netflix film "Rebel Moon" shares some DNA with "Star Wars." Way back in 2013, outlets reported that the future "Justice League" filmmaker was already working on an idea for a "Star Wars" project in the vein of Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai." By 2021, Lucasfilm had become firmly Disney-fied, and while some of its new "Star Wars" projects were great, Snyder's wasn't among them. Instead, as he shared at the time, the idea — which he says never featured any familiar Star Wars characters in the first place — had spun off into an original sci-fi film. That film, it turned out, was "Rebel Moon."

Despite the fact that "Rebel Moon" has surely gone through some changes in the decade since Snyder first began talking about his sci-fi epic, the final product will no doubt still garner "Star Wars" comparisons thanks to its origin story. /Film visited the set of "Rebel Moon" before the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and spoke with Snyder about how he sees the inevitable "Star Wars" comparisons.

"I don't think you can make a sci-fi movie now that's not going to be compared to a 'Star Wars' movie in some way," Snyder shared. "But I do welcome and am happy to discuss where it will end up in popular culture in regard to the legacy of 'Star Wars,'" he went on, "and how 'Star Wars' has the lion's share of creative thinking when it comes to audiences and their love of the 'Star Wars' universe and that evolution."

The two-part epic "Rebel Moon" might remind audiences of "Star Wars," but it'll also be more adult: according to sound mixer Andy Koyama, there are R-rated versions of the two films already in the works, in addition to the standard cut. In an interview with Empire, Snyder revealed that his wish for an R-rated "Star Wars" was "almost a non-starter," and that "the deeper I got into it, I realized it was probably never going to be what I wanted."

Still, "Rebel Moon" has a plot that seems to carry the spirit of "Star Wars." It's all about a group of underdog rebels facing off against a powerful villain, and Snyder has previously described it as "a romantic sci-fi film on a scale that is, frankly, as big as you can make a movie." During the set visit, Snyder explained the special place "Star Wars" has in pop culture, and the ways in which its impact has inspired a generation of artists. "It's a rare thing, of course, because [with] 'Star Wars,' the fan base basically just aged with the movies and then had children that then also became fans of the movie and their children had children that became friends with the movie," he said. He continued, "I do also understand the love of it and how canonized it is and actually how immobile it is."

That "immobility" he's referencing might refer to the ways in which Lucasfilm has been perceived as keeping the "Star Wars" franchise largely the same over the decades. While I can see a story as standalone as Snyder's working in the current era of "Andor," in previous years, "Star Wars" has always felt more loyal than other major franchises to the tone, characters, and even story beats of its original trilogy. "Which is probably why I'm here now doing it the way I'm doing it," Snyder shared with /Film, "because we really have no rules except for the ones we make."

Snyder concludes: "I'm only hopeful that someone, long after we're done making these movies, is going like, 'No, that's not right,' because something that we did by accident is now a thing that can't be changed." It sounds like he's hoping the film becomes big enough to kick-start its own franchise canon – and perhaps even inspire future filmmakers to riff on it with their own works. At the very least, I hope Netflix gives the movie enough of a theatrical release to become a proper blockbuster. Part one of "Rebel Moon" is due for a December 22, 2023 release on Netflix and is expected to have a theatrical run as well.