UPDATE, September 3: His Wonder Woman is ready too. Gal Gadot told JoBlo: “If Zack comes back to run DC, I’ll come back.”
UPDATE: Snyder is now stoking the Dark Knight fire himself, saying of the rumors: “I put weight on the rumors, because the rumors work”.
The Last Photograph finally has a date.
TIFF announced a special screening of Zack Snyder’s film, which will make its world premiere at 6:30 pm on Sunday, September 13, in the John Bassett Theatre, the festival’s new venue at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
And per my source, the film is only part of the story: Snyder is “well prepared for a Dark Knight film.”
World Premiere September 13 — Still Shopping For A Buyer
This answers the “Standby” tease.
The Last Photograph goes into Toronto as an acquisition title — no studio or streamer has the rights — and will screen for buyers at TIFF: The Market, the festival’s inaugural official content market.
The film stars Stuart Martin and Fra Fee as an ex-DEA agent seeking revenge in a South American jungle, and was shot in Colombia, Iceland, and Los Angeles, with Snyder himself behind the camera as cinematographer.
Snyder finished the film with no distributor attached, with buyers reportedly balking at how violent it is, which, as I’ve said, is the same thing they said about every Snyder cut that turned out to be the better version.
So instead of waiting for a studio, he’s taking it straight to the audience and the market. That’s not a fallback. That’s the plan.
The Indie Route Is The New Power Move
Here’s my source on what Snyder is actually doing: “The fact that he made an indie film and is taking it to TIFF aligns him with the new rebels of filmmaking, like Kane Parsons and Curry Barker. He’s following Baz Luhrmann, who directed the Elvis concert film EPiC independently without a studio — even though Warners produced his Elvis movie — and took it to TIFF to world premiere it to finally get a distributor.”
The receipts on that playbook are undeniable.
Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert premiered at TIFF in September 2025 with no distributor, and Neon and Universal Pictures acquired domestic and international rights after it debuted to critical acclaim.
Same festival, same year: Curry Barker — who put his $800 debut Milk & Serial on YouTube after distributors passed — premiered Obsession at Toronto, Focus Features bought it, and the sub-$1 million film went on to a massive worldwide gross.
Parsons is the teenage Backrooms creator whose viral shorts became an A24 movie.
That’s the company Snyder is walking into Toronto with: filmmakers who built their own audiences, made their films their way, and let the studios come to them.
“Well Prepared For A Dark Knight Film”
Then my source pivoted to DC: “Going back to Zack, he’s well prepared for a Dark Knight film.”
Readers here know exactly how literally to take that.
As I reported last month, The Dark Knight Returns is fully storyboarded — boarded out by Jay Oliva and Snyder himself — with the plan to adapt Frank Miller’s graphic novel “as is,” just like Watchmen.
Snyder wants Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill.
The prep isn’t what’s missing; the greenlight is. Or as Snyder put it on stage next to Miller: “when they let us.”
And “they” is changing.
As I reported in my Open Season story, Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy are already taking pitches from Snyder, Affleck, and Christopher McQuarrie as the Paramount takeover reshapes DC, and my sources say James Gunn’s contract expires in 2027 with no new extension in place.
Look at the sequence.
The regime taking over DC is listening to pitches. The current leadership’s clock runs out in 2027. The Dark Knight Returns is boarded and waiting.
And the director whose fans never stopped campaigning for his return is about to walk a film he shot with his own hands into Toronto, exactly the way the new generation does it.
