Netflix has over 3 dozen original films slated for release in 2021. The one I’m most excited for? Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead”, the follow up to his 2004 re-imagining 1978’s George Romero cult classic “Dawn of the Dead”.
The plot is not what you’d expect for the genre. Following the zombie outbreak, a group of mercenaries take the ultimate gamble; Venturing into the quarantine zone of Las Vegas to pull off the greatest heist ever attempted.
Snyder tells EW, “It is a full-blown, balls-to-the-wall zombie heist movie, so it’s genre-on-genre in a great way. So you expect pure zombie mayhem, and you get that, 100 percent. But also you get these really amazing characters on a fantastic journey. It’s going to surprise people that there’s a lot of warmth and real emotion with these great characters.”
“We’re most excited about the accumulation of different things,” Netflix Head of Original Films Scott Stuber recently told Deadline. “I’m excited about Zack Snyder coming back around on the zombie genre he and I worked on in our early days with Dawn of the Dead at Universal, and Army of the Dead is going to be fun.”
As for the potential to an expanded Universe for Snyder’s zombie vision, he had this to say, “I’m incredibly excited for the opportunity to partner with Netflix again as we expand the Army of the Dead universe with both an international prequel, as well as exploring the visually dynamic world of animation. It’s been a great collaboration and we are thrilled that Netflix sees this as big of an IP as we do.”
2004’s Dawn of the Dead re-imagining was on the forefront of revitalizing the Post Apocalyptic Zombie genre, a full six years prior to AMC’s success of their adapting Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic book to televisions around the world, so its long past due to travel through Snyder’s gore filled world.
We don’t have an exact release date for Snyder’s next sprint through the zombie horde, but with its teaser dropping today, and his extended director’s cut of Justice League heading to HBO MAX in a few months, fall of 2021 seems likely.
ARMY OF THE DEAD
Director: Zack Snyder
Staring:
Dave “Guardians of the Galaxy” Bautista as Scott Ward
Ella “Chruchill” Purnell as Kate Ward
Ana “Eastbound & Down” de la Reguera as Cruz
Garret “Fear the Walking Dead” Dillahunt as Frank Peters
Raúl “Looking” Castillo as Mikey Guzman
“Snyder added to the zombie genre the notion of transforming the lumbering flesh eaters to sprinters, and here he introduces a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, and a group of mercenaries who use the zombies as cover to pull off a major heist in a quarantine zone.”
