Director Zack Snyder certainly has been keeping busy with his two-part sci-fi epic Rebel Moon as well as the Army of the Dead series, both of them for Netflix. As promotion for Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire gears up for its release next month, Snyder has revealed a connection he was planning between the two franchises in the apparently scrapped anime prequel Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas.
Army of the Dead followed a mercenary group who were hired to rob a casino in a zombie-infested Las Vegas months after a massive outbreak. The movie spawned a prequel Army of Thieves and was to have an anime prequel Lost Vegas which would have further explored the initial outbreak and the attempts to evacuate as many people as the Army of the Dead characters could before the city was closed off to the rest of the world. It would have been in the anime that the connection to Rebel Moon would have been revealed.
In an interview with Total Film, Snyder said “Army of the Dead has a pretty vast mythology that never made it into the movie,” Snyder explains. “There’s actually a character from Rebel Moon in the Army of the Dead animated series that we never did. At one point in the show, they go through a portal into another dimension, and there are characters in that other dimension that they come across. In Rebel Moon, they’re in this bar, and one of the aliens is one of the characters from the animatic. So it’s definitely a shared universe.”
Who knows if this might have led to an actual crossover between the franchises or just an Easter Egg, but the way Snyder refers to them as a shared universe certainly seems to imply a bigger connection.
As to the status of Lost Vegas, it seems Netflix decided not to move forward with its release, though Snyder reveals much of the work for it is already done. “We did all the scripts and the animatics, and all the voices are recorded. So you could watch it, even in its crazy animatic form – you can watch the whole run,” Snyder said. Time will tell if we’ll ever see this series fully finished, but there are plans to do a sequel titled Planet of the Dead that he will reportedly begin working on after the release of Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver.
When a peaceful colony on the edge of a galaxy finds itself threatened by the armies of a tyrannical ruling force, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a mysterious stranger living among the villagers, becomes their best hope for survival. Tasked with finding trained fighters who will unite with her in making an impossible stand against the Mother World, Kora assembles a small band of warriors — outsiders, insurgents, peasants, and orphans of war from different worlds who share a common need for redemption and revenge. As the shadow of an entire Realm bears down on the unlikeliest of moons, a battle over the fate of a galaxy is waged, and in the process, a new army of heroes is formed.
The cast of Rebel Moon includes Sofia Boutella, Charlie Hunnam, Djimon Hounsou, Anthony Hopkins, Doona Bae, Ray Fisher, Stuart Martin, Cary Elwes, Corey Stoll, Michiel Huisman, Alfonso Herrera, Ed Skrein, Cleopatra Coleman, Fra Fee, Rhian Rees, Jena Malone, E. Duffy, Charlotte Maggi, Sky Yang, and Staz Nair.
Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire streams on Netflix from December 22nd, 2023, while Part 2: The Scargiver is released on April 19th, 2024
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