Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon Universe Expands To An Animated Series & Beyond
When Zack Snyder goes hard, he goes harder than your average everyday civilian casually ordering a meal that includes 55 burgers and 55 fries from a drive-in. His upcoming cosmic epic for Netflix, "Rebel Moon," has already been split up into two films, with Snyder also planning to release two different cuts of each movie (one that's PG-13, the other R-rated). The project itself, which originated as the filmmaker's pitch for a "Star Wars" movie, takes place in a fantastical universe where a scrappy band of warriors team up to help the residents of a moon fight back against the totalitarian Mother World and its powerful army, the Imperium. It's an idea that Snyder has been marinating on for many years, affording him plenty of time to cook up enough mythology to sustain a sequel and beyond.
We've done this dance before, haven't we? When Snyder signed on to direct Warner Bros.' "Superman" reboot "Man of Steel," he brought with him the vision for a much larger DC cinematic universe, most of which would ultimately go unrealized. Then, when he made his zombie action flick "Army of the Dead" for Netflix, it was quickly followed by the release of a prequel/spinoff film, only for his plans for an additional sequel and animated series to hit a snag. Now, in an interview for the next issue of Total Film magazine (via GamesRadar+), Snyder has confirmed he's got far more than just two "Rebel Moon" films and a potential sequel in mind.
"I'm the gatekeeper for what's possible. I'm the only one who knows where the whole story is going, and I do have it mapped all the way," Snyder explained. You gotta give the man credit, he's certainly persistent.
800 years will give you such a crick in the neck
Original big-budget sci-fi films are few and far between these days, so if you're going to take a swing at one, you better make sure it counts. That seems to be Zack Snyder's reasoning, anyway, as the filmmaker told Total Film he's already thinking far beyond two "Rebel Moon" films. "We're doing a narrative podcast, and an animated comic book, and an animated series," he explained. If you just seized up at the thought of having to do homework before even sitting down to watch Snyder's two-part space opera, you may be comforted to know that it sounds like these projects will be complementary and not mandatory. "They all take place before the events of the [first] movie. So you can start to understand the vastness of the mythology that we've been working on," he added.
The "Rebel Moon" films reunite Snyder with his "Army of the Dead" scribe Shay Hatten and "300" writer Kurt Johnstad, the latter of whom also had some insight to offer the outlet about just how much lore is already established. "The world is very, very detailed and fleshed out. There's hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents of methodology and mythology and lore. The timeline goes back 800 years, from our movies," he noted. In fact, there's no less than a 12-foot whiteboard's worth of material covering events in the "Rebel Moon" universe. "There's a ruler with inches underneath that whiteboard," Johnstad added. "And the two movies are literally two or three inches of that entire 12-foot span."
That's, um, a lot. Will we actually see most of it? We'll find out when "Rebel Moon: Part One — A Child of Fire" reaches Netflix on December 22, 2023, followed by "Rebel Moon: Part Two — The Scargiver" on April 19, 2024