UPDATE 3: The Last Photograph no longer hangs in the balance: Snyder has announced a Toronto festival bow for September 13, with tickets on sale now.
UPDATE 2: Snyder has now posted “Standby” with new The Last Photograph images, and fans asked the distributor question again right in the comments.
UPDATE: Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld has joined in, asking Snyder to call him over a Darkseid fan edit: “Why did we lose our appreciation for Zack Snyder?”
Zack Snyder’s The Last Photograph is a finished movie sitting without a distributor, with reports stating that potential buyers consider it “extremely violent, even by Snyder standards.”
This week, we laid out how that is the exact objection that came before the director’s cuts of Watchmen, Batman v Superman, Justice League, and Rebel Moon proved to be the better movies every single time.
Days later, Snyder returned to Instagram.
After a week of “too violent” headlines, the first thing he posted was an R-rated director’s cut.
Snyder shared a still of Sofia Boutella as Kora, captioned: “@sofisia7 in Rebel Moon – Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness. Released August 2, 2024.”
Note which version that is. Curse of Forgiveness is not the PG-13 movie Netflix released in April 2024. It is the R-rated director’s cut that arrived four months later, the version Snyder has always treated as the real one.
While The Last Photograph hangs in the balance, Snyder is reminding fans which version of his movies wins in the end.
The Comments Turned Into A Director’s Cut Rally
His fans got it.
“Nobody will ever be able to convince me that Rebel Moon films were bad,” said the top comment.
“We want Rebelmoon part 3,” added another.
“4K blu rays of the Director’s Cuts when?” asked a fan, next to more fans asking if the films will ever hit physical media at all and a request for Junkie XL’s director’s cut scores to get released.
Netflix has announced nothing on a third chapter, discs, or the scores.
Then He Shot The Blood Moon On His iPhone
Hours after the Kora post, the August 27 lunar eclipse turned the Moon copper red over the Americas, and Snyder went outside with his phone.
He posted two shots — a close-up of the eclipsed Moon, and a wide shot from outside his house with the Moon a bright speck above the city lights — captioned, “You guys seen this!!! shot with my iPhone the thing works pretty good.”
The post pulled 23.5K likes in its first eight hours.
Technically it was a deep partial eclipse, not a total one, though nobody standing outside was arguing the difference.
At the peak — 9:13 p.m. Pacific, just after midnight Eastern — about 96% of the Moon’s face sat inside Earth’s shadow, per NASA, with the covered portion glowing red and a thin bright edge left over.
That is exactly what Snyder’s photo shows, and it is the deepest lunar eclipse anyone on Earth will see until the next total one arrives on New Year’s Eve 2028.
The comments turned it into Rebel Moon night. The top one: “Seems like the moon is rebelling.. it’s a.. Rebel Moon!”
“A real Rebel’s Moon, one might say,” offered another fan. A third told Snyder, “I thought you were on Veldt for a second,” name-checking the farming village at the heart of both films.
And since the second slide shows the Moon over a glass-and-wood modern house on a hillside, someone had to say it: “Looks like Bruce Wayne’s house.”
Ray Porter, the voice of Darkseid in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, checked in from under the same sky: “I was up in Altadena doing the same thing.”
The Last Photograph followed him there, too.
One fan asked directly about the report that the film still has no distributor: “Any truth to that, and if so, would you consider self-distributing and going on tour with it?” As of this writing, Snyder hasn’t answered.
It caps a month where The Last Photograph teaser arrived with no studio attached, an Insidious director recounted how “lovely” Snyder’s Justice League set actually was, Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy gave Snyder a hero’s welcome on the Warner Bros. lot, and, per our insiders, The Dark Knight Returns sits fully storyboarded waiting on the far side of the Paramount-Warner Bros. fight.
In the middle of all that, the guy went out in the yard and shot the Moon on his phone.
