Earlier this year it was reported that Zack Snyder’s 300 could be getting a prequel TV series and now Snyder is confirming that the project is moving forward. This week marks the premiere of Snyder’s new Netflix anime series Twilight of the Gods, so he’s been out doing press to promote it. When ComicBook had a chance sit down and speak to Snyder, we made sure to get an update on how far along things are with the 300 TV series.
“We’re just getting ready to dive in and get to work on it. It’s super fun, I love the world,” Snyder said. “And even just in the preliminary meetings we’ve had talking about, like, ‘What if this happened or that happened,’ just a lot of it’s just really fun to like go, wow, it’s a rich standard. It’s similar to this [Twilignt of the Gods] in a weird way. As far as there’s a lot of underpinnings.”
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The 300 TV series will reportedly be a prequel, presumably following Spartans led by King Leonidas before they went to war with Xerxes. The original film, of course, centered on a group of 300 Spartan soldiers who went into battle against the much larger Persian army led by Xerxes I. The 300 all died in the end, during the battle of Thermopylae, but they took out many more Persians with them. A sequel film, 300: Rise of an Empire was released in 2014, and acted as a prequel, interquel, and sequel to the original film, chronicling how the Spartans took on the Persians at the Battle of Artemisium and the Battle of Salamis in the Greco-Persian Wars.
A prequel story would presumably chronicle how King Leonidas (played by Gerard Butler in the original film) earned his reputation as a Spartan warrior and leader through some formative battle(s). The long-form version of 300 makes sense, as sword-and-sandals and/or fantasy TV series (Game of Thrones, Spartacus, Vikings) have carved out a major lane in the TV marketplace – and the original 300 (2006) helped set that bar. Snyder’s slow-motion comic-style visuals will also help distinguish the TV series (if it stays consistent with the film’s style and tone) and it would be interesting to see who Snyder would recast as younger versions of the characters we met in 300, like Leonidas, Gorgo (Lena Headey), Artemis (Vincent Regan), Stelios (Michael Fassbender) and others. The same can be said of expanding upon the fantastical version of Ancient Greece that comic writer Frank Miller and artist Lynn Varley originally created.
The 300 TV series is currently in development.
