Zack Snyder is back as he is returning to the movie business with a new zombie flick, Army of the Dead, directing for Netflix.
In addition to directing, Snyder will also produce the movie with his wife Deborah Snyder under their newly formed production company, Stone Quarry, with Wesley Coller also producing.
Zack Snyder came up with the story for Army of the Dead, with the script written by Joby Harold, who is said to have written a DCEU Flashpoint script.
The movie is set amid a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, during which a man assembles a group of mercenaries to take the ultimate gamble, venturing into the quarantined zone to pull off the greatest heist ever attempted.
THR reports the movie has been at Warner Bros. since 2007, but now Netflix is taking on the film, which will start shooting this Summer and will have a budget of around $90 million.
“There are no handcuffs on me at all with this one,” Zack Snyder told THR. “I thought this was a good palate cleanser to really dig in with both hands and make something fun and epic and crazy and bonkers in the best possible way.”
As noted, Army of the Dead brings Zack Snyder full circle, as he directed Dawn of the Dead in 2004, and the new project also reunites Snyder with Netflix movie head Scott Stuber who was at Universal at the time of Dawn.
“I love to honor canon and the works of art,” Snyder said of his adaptations, “but this is the opportunity to find a purely joyful way to express myself through a genre. It will be the most kick-ass, self-aware — but not in a wink-to-the-camera way — balls-to-the-wall zombie freakshow that anyone has ever seen. No one’s ever let me completely loose [like this]. I love big action, I love big sequences. My movie brain starts clicking around and I was like, ‘We need to be shooting this now!’ Constructing these sequences really fired me up.”
Zack Snyder recently was at Warner Bros. having launched the DCEU including Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and while he left the Justice League movie over a personal matter, Snyder was responsible for casting Jason Momoa as Aquaman, with the recent James Wan movie becoming the #1 DC film of all time at the box office. Snyder also directed Watchmen back in 2009.
