It’s been eight years since Zack Snyder directed a movie that didn’t take place in the DC Extended Universe (Sucker Punch), and 15 years since his directorial debut, Dawn of the Dead. The man that birthed the #SnyderCut will return to his walking dead roots, however, in Netflix’s Army of the Dead. The horror-thriller is set during 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,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. (So, what you’re saying is… zombie heist? ZOMBIE HEIST.) Snyder, who’s directing from a script by Joby Harold, called Army of the Dead 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.”
Army of the Dead has been in various stages of development since the late-2000s, when it had a very different script. It’s since been “completely redone,” reports the Playlist, but in an earlier draft, there’s what io9 called the “most vile” scene in a zombie movie ever. When asked about Army of the Dead in 2011, then-director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. teased an “extra dimension to this zombie film, because they… they… I’m still wondering if I should tell this… the male zombies rape human females. Yes. And they have human hybrid zombie offsprings. It’s a new take on the zombie genre, which is crazy.”
Again, that disturbing sequence has been cut. Instead, Snyder is using Army of the Dead, which is expected to have a $90 million budget, to “find a purely joyful way to express myself though 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].”
(Via the Hollywood Reporter, the Playlist, io9)
