Considering what happened with his film before Army of the Dead it makes a lot of sense why director Zack Snyder would take his talents to Netflix where he’d be given total creative control. Even with the freedom afforded him by the streamer for his new action-horror movie there was something he considered that was cut out of the movie. When asked in an interview with The Times if there was a moment in the film that was cut because he thought it went too far, he replied: “Yes. We had a sequence where one of the male strippers had a huge penis with a bite taken out of it….We thought that was too much.”
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Snyder also addressed the timing of the release of his movie happening one year into a global pandemic, adding: “All coincidental! But the more I saw what was happening, I didn’t know if the movie would be cathartic or scary.” In the end it seems the film will be a bit of both as they took a page out of the late George A. Romero’s playbook and are using the zombie genre as a means for social commentary. “But of course George Romero said it was all social commentary. And we felt obliged to do that with this movie,” Snyder said. “Editorialise a little bit and zombie movies are a great place to talk about us as a people. Ours is a monster movie where the monster is us. It is a social movie more than a science movie – the science is pretty iffy.”
As fans may recall, Snyder’s first feature film as a director was the 2004 remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, bringing things full circle.
The filmmaker also spoke with the outlet about how he sees himself as a filmmaker now and the freedom that he wants to have as a storyteller, which boils down to Snyder seemingly having no interest in working in the studio system anymore.
“Where it gets difficult is when you take a director with a personal point of view and ask him to participate in a thing that is not asking for that,” Snyder added. “The journeyman film-maker? There are a lot of them, and they’re good. I just happen to have a specific point of view. The lesson I’ve learnt is it’s much easier for me, as a film-maker, to create a world and invite you into it. As opposed to me saying, ‘Let me put my cog in your wheel.’ Like, I would love to make a Star Wars movie, I know a lot about it — but I don’t think I would survive that.”
Army of the Dead is scheduled to have a limited run in theaters starting May 14th and will stream exclusively on Netflix starting on May 21st.
