Zack Snyder Reveals A Secret Connection Between Rebel Moon And Army Of The Dead

Zack Snyder's sci-fi film "Rebel Moon: Part One — A Child of Fire" — to cite its full title — is due for release on December 15, 2023, and, like all of Snyder's films, promises to be visually complex and cinematically overblown. Snyder loves a certain kind of hazy photography as well as bold, brassy characters, usually living within an action-packed milieu that allows them to deliver profound-sounding platitudes in bedroom-voiced monologues while slashing people open in slow-motion. "Rebel Moon" will be a sci-fi riff on the "Seven Samurai" story, with a distant-future agrarian moon standing in for a beleaguered 16th-century Japanese village, and an encroaching Empire-like army standing in for Kurosawa's itinerant bandits. Sofia Boutella will play a character who travels the galaxy to gather up a ragtag group of failed warriors to protect her moon from almost-assured destruction.

Snyder's last film as a director was 2021's "Army of the Dead," a high-octane heist movie about a ragtag group of macho law-breakers who set out to steal millions of dollars from a zombie-infested Las Vegas casino. That film was 148 minutes long and built out a lot of backstory and plot into its relatively simple premise. Indeed, only six months after "Army of the Dead" was released, German actor and filmmaker Matthias Schweighöfer released a spin-off film (which Snyder co-wrote) about the safecracker he played in "Army of the Dead." It was called "Army of Thieves," and it was better than the original.

Evidently, "Army of the Dead" will also share a connection to "Rebel Moon." In an interview with GamesRadar+, Snyder revealed that an unproduced "Army of the Dead" animated spinoff TV series was to feature a character that would, somehow, also appear in "Rebel Moon." A dimensional portal would have been involved.

The initial plans for "Army of the Dead," one can see, were quite ambitious. Not only did Snyder oversee a spinoff film that came out the same year as the original, but one might also find a pair of tie-in short films — "The Reckoning" and "Guzman of the Dead 420" — that Snyder either wrote, co-wrote, or directed. Snyder has also talked about wanting to make a follow-up film called "Planet of the Dead," and is already in development on an animated series called "Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas." That's an awful lot of "Army of the Dead" to map out that swiftly. It seems that Snyder has, in his mind, a much broader sense of "Army of the Dead" than a mere heist picture with zombies in it.

Also, evidently, a character from "Rebel Moon" is set to shunt their way through a time portal and end up in the future of "Lost Vegas." Snyder explained: 

"'Army of the Dead' has a pretty vast mythology that never made it into the movie. [...] There's actually a character from 'Rebel Moon' in the 'Army of the Dead' animated series that we never did. [...] At one point in the show, they go through a portal into another dimension, and there are characters in that other dimension that they come across. [...] In 'Rebel Moon,' they're in this bar, and one of the aliens is one of the characters from the animatic. So it's definitely a shared universe."

It's a tenuous connection, but a connection nonetheless. 

To cite some precedent, the entire "Alien vs. Predator" film franchise began with a similar cameo. While the "Alien vs. Predator" franchise began in comic book form in 1989, a mass audience sat up and took notice when they spotted a Xenomorph skull on the trophy rack of a Yautja ship in the 1990 film "Predator 2." Comics about Xenomorphs fighting Yautjas would continue apace for a decade. The first "Alien vs. Predator" film — a franchise that had become a natural feature of the pop media landscape — was released in 2004.

As for "Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas," Snyder seemed to indicate that it could still come to pass, even if the production is currently halted in the animatic phase. He noted:

"We did all the scripts and the animatics, and all the voices are recorded. So you could watch it, even in its crazy animatic form — you can watch the whole run."

An animatic is, for laypeople, a rough draft of an animated show or film that uses storyboards and voice recordings to let the filmmakers know the general visuals and pace of the finished product. From there, usually, music needs to be composed, sound effects added, and actual animation completed. An animatic of "Lost Vegas" might be watchable, but it's far from a final TV series. There is currently no release date scheduled for "Lost Vegas," but Snyder's more passionate fans will want to watch the upcoming "Rebel Moon" movies like a hawk. Which alien, fans may posit, will cross over into the "Army of the Dead" universe?

"Rebel Moon: Part One — A Child of Fire" premieres on Netflix on December 22, 2023, followed by "Rebel Moon: Part Two — The Scargiver" on April 19, 2024.