Zack Snyder says his Army of the Dead 2 sequel idea is ‘insane’

Zack Snyder made his feature-film debut with the 2004 zombie redux, Daybreak of the Lifeless. Eighteen years later, and with a complete DC comic-book “verse” behind him, the director returns to the style together with his personal creation: the undead-filled, action-heavy heist thriller Military of the Lifeless. The one-last-mission saga, following a gaggle of ex-zombie fighters preventing by undead-infested Las Vegas to crack a protected with tens of millions in money, is rowdy, cinematic extra. It’s pure Snyder.

True to type, it’s additionally only the start. As was the case together with his Justice League movies, Snyder launched into the journey of Military of the Lifeless with a bigger world and timeline in thoughts. A few of that story shall be instructed in Military of the Lifeless: Misplaced Vegas, an animated prequel coming to Netflix within the not-too-distant future. Based mostly on the movie’s ultimate scenes (which Snyder places proper into the principle run of the image, as a substitute of shying away from the notion with an after-credits scene), the film is poised to spawn a direct sequel, if the numbers make sense. Whereas most filmmakers can be content material with two zombie films of their oeuvre, Snyder tells Polygon he is aware of precisely what he needs out of an Military of the Lifeless 2, and hopes he can return to deliver that story to life.

“Shay [Hatten, co-writer] and I do know precisely what occurs subsequent,” he says, “and it’s insane.”

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for the ending of Army of the Dead.]

By the tip of Military of the Lifeless, many of the crew, together with Dave Bautista’s ringleader Scott Ward, is useless. However due to a well-timed push right into a on line casino protected, Scott’s previous pal Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick) survives the nuclear blast. However a “nuke the fridge” second can’t save him from a zombie’s chunk. Whereas he heads south of the border aboard a flowery personal jet, it’s clear Vanderohe isn’t going to make it, and the world’s brain-eater drawback isn’t over. Snyder “completely would” wish to deliver that “what if?” second to life in a sequel.

“I’d make it in a second. What we’ve got deliberate is simply too loopy. As soon as we knew Vanderohe was bit, and he’s going to Mexico Metropolis, I used to be like, ‘You realize what’s gonna occur?’ After which I simply went on a tear. And by the point it ended, Shay was like, ‘OK.’”

Photograph: CLAY ENOS/NETFLIX

With a trigger-happy president able to drop nukes on his issues — and even an look by Sean Spicer, former Trump White Home Press Secretary — Military of the Lifeless has a number of the blunt social-commentary fringe of a basic zombie film. A sequel that takes the motion to Mexico might be equally biting. However all through his Netflix romp, Snyder, who loves an Easter egg, planted traces of world-building that might repay in wilder methods.

“How concerning the robotic zombie? Did you catch these?” he says with a sinister chuckle. I didn’t, actually, catch the robotic zombies.

Snyder’s fast to level out that Zeus, the alpha zombie whose killing spreed kickstarts the Sin-Metropolis-wide apocalypse, escapes from a container within the opening sequence that (in the event you pause and squint on the proper second) is marked with a transport deal with to Iran. “Like, is he some form of covert bioweapon?” the director asks me, an individual who didn’t make the film.

Midway by the film, when the crew lastly arrives at their goal on line casino, Vanderohe and a number of the crew uncover a set of rotting our bodies by the vault. The corpses all look like dressed precisely like Vanderohe’s group, proper all the way down to a particular necklace. Despite their tight timeline, Vanderohe pauses to drop a idea: possibly the corpses are them from an alternate timeline. The purple herring-ish second by no means comes up once more, but it surely’s unattainable to shake. What was the take care of that?

“I don’t know, what’s the deal?” Snyder says, with much more sinister chuckling. “Is Tanaka [the bankroller of the heist operation] Satan or God, and we’re simply pawns in some perverse play?”

There might be solutions in an Military of the Lifeless 2, if Netflix greenlights the movie and Snyder isn’t busy elsewhere. The director says his long-gestating drama Horse Latitudes (beforehand referred to as The Final {Photograph}) continues to be on the docket, although COVID suspended his formidable plans to shoot around the globe in locations like Bolivia and Iceland. In the meantime, Snyder says he’s lastly wrapped a script he’s been chipping away at for 5 years, and is “making an attempt to get Netflix to comply with do it.”

Is it sci-fi? Horror? Extra grounded drama? “It’s an enormous, large, loopy film,” he says. So one factor is evident: Whether or not he makes the thriller mission his subsequent movie or he strikes on to Military of the Lifeless 2, viewers ought to count on pure Snyder out of the deal.