Zack Snyder’s Army Of The Dead Zombies Might Be Aliens With Area 51 Origin

Zack Snyder fans are eagerly anticipating his zombie apocalypse heist film Army of the Dead debuting on Netflix this year. However, some newly revealed plot details from the film indicate that Army of the Dead won’t be your typical ‘rise of the undead’ explanation of how the zombie apocalypse unfolds – no, Zack Snyder apparently has a deeper and more intricate backstory planned (surprise). Apparently, the zombies in Army of the Dead will have their origin tied to aliens, and Nevada’s infamous Area 51 facility, which has long been the center of conspiracy theories about alien life discovered on Earth.

In EW‘s feature on Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, we get the following teases about this zombies-meet-aliens backstory that Snyder and Co. have come up with:

“[Army of the Dead’s] setup is that a plague has been released from Nevada’s secretive Area 51 military base. The U.S. government has managed to contain the outbreak by building a wall around an overrun Sin City. But there’s still all that cash in zombie-infested casinos, if only somebody is brave (or dumb) enough to try to go and get it.”

As fans know from Zack Snyder’s work on DC Films like Batman v Superman and the upcoming Justice League Director’s Cut, the filmmaker likes to go deep into the mythology of the cinematic worlds he creates. Army of the Dead will be no different; Netflix has already committed to doing a four-hour animated series spinoff of the film, which will cover the Area 51 alien origins of the zombie virus:

“I’ve done a very deep dive with the why of the zombie plague and where it starts,” Snyder explains. “Sufficed to say, that it does come from Area 51 — that’s in the film’s opening scene – and then the whole cast is in the animated series, along with Christian Slater as the bad guy. We really do a super deep dive on where this like zombie plague came from.”

As stated, Snyder’s DC Films work earned him a reputation for getting almost too deep and convoluted with backstory and mythos. Army of the Dead will hopefully have a much more focused and streamlined story arc – one in which the larger questions of backstory and explanation don’t distract from the main action: watching a bunch of would-be crooks get stuck in a heist gone terribly wrong, in the middle of a zombie horde. Fans shouldn’t be required to watch additional content to enjoy Army of the Dead, so hopefully, they don’t have to.

Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead streams on Netflix in 2021.