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Rebel Moon

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021
Rebel Moon is an upcoming two-part film directed by Zack Snyder and written by Snyder, Shay Hatten (writer, Army of the Dead), and Kurt Johnstad (writer, 300). The film will be produced by Deborah Snyder, Zack Snyder, their production partners Wesley Coller of The Stone Quarry and Eric Newman of Grand Electric.

Production Weekly reported that the two parts of the film are being filmed back-to-back from April 18 to November 4, and the movie officially began filming on April 19.

Rebel Moon originated as a Star Wars concept that Snyder pitched to Lucasfilm about a decade ago, following-up on the events of Return of the Jedi, with new Jedi warriors embarking on a dangerous mission. Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012, which put a pause on production talks. Snyder and Newman at one point deliberated on making it into a series, but ultimately decided to make it a feature film and an original IP, rather than something that'll be read as Zack Snyder's The Mandalorian now that The Mandalorian's been out for a few seasons.

Synopsis​

Rebel Moon will follow the residents of a peaceful colony in a distant galaxy as they struggle against an impending invasion by a warlord named Balisarius. The female protagonist (portrayed by Sofia Boutella) is tasked with recruiting warriors from neighboring planets to oppose the invading force.


Production​

NameRole
Zack SnyderDirected by, story by, produced by, director of photography
Deborah SnyderProduced by
Wesley CollerProduced by
Eric NewmanProduced by
Sarah BowenExecutive producer
Kurt JohnstadStory by
Shay HattenScreenplay by
Dody DornEditor

Cast​

NameRole
Sofia BoutellaKora
Charlie HunnamKai
Djimon HounsouGeneral Titus
Ray FisherDarrian Bloodaxe
Doona BaeNemesis
Jena MaloneHarmada
Staz NairTarak
E. DuffyMilius
Charlotte MaggiSam
Sky YangAris
Ed Skrein (replacing Rupert Friend)Admiral Atticus Noble
Stuart MartinTBA
Cary ElwesKing of the Galactic Empire
Corey StollTBA
Stuart MartinTBA
Michiel HuismanGunnar
Alfonso HerreraTBA
Cleopatra ColemanDevra Bloodaxe
Fra FeeRegent Balisarius
Rhian ReesTBA
Anthony HopkinsJimmy
Dustin CeithamerJimmy (body only)
Christine Kellogg-DarrinHervor
Stella Grace FitzgeraldPrincess Issa
Kayden KoshelevFinn
Rayne BidderMaia
Kingston FosterEdda
Trisha SimmonsVeldt Drummer
Daniel CobdenVeldt Kid
Mikel FarberReaper
Hamish SturgeonCommanding Officer
Ingvar SigurdssonHagen
Jay HectorThe Gen. Docking Officer
Daisy DavisRebel Pilot
Michael Wayne JamesPatron
Jordan ColemanBackground alien
John OrrPriest (alien)
Anselmo Giovanni BehrensBackground (creature actor)
Giovanni LopesMan of Daggus
Meredith VanCuykCourtesan
TrishnaSamarian Royal
David SlamanThresher
Michaela RancesThresher
Pia SaloThresher
Vera MyersToan Priestess
Oliver FredinReaper
Thomas OhrstromTorvald
Skylar Okerstrom-LangOskar
Sam BassTBA supporting role
Dominic BurgessDash Thif
Darren JacobsTBA supporting role
Ray PorterTBA
Gordon TarpleyPatron
Danielle BurgioInge
Colby LemmoTBA
Tomm VossKullen
Patrick LuwisIvar
Christina LargentTBA
Raven Armando AstoneTBA
Josefine LindegaardGreta
Sisse MarieAstrid
Isabella BrenzaTBA
Mario G ValdezTBA
Mark StegerLifty
Christopher Matthew CookXimon
Zack PalmisanoPatron
Allen Lee HaffSoldier
Vaia ZaganasToan Priestess
Greg KriekMarcus
Caden DragomerEljun
Thor KnaiHjalmar
Justin PriceRebel Pilot
Melissa HuntBrenn
Geoffrey Dean MallardPatron / Veldt Villager
Max PescherineShooter
Richard CetroneLead Krypteian
Michael James BellAssistant Medical Technician
Brett Robert CulbertGunnery Commander
Kendall WellsKaan
Adam J. SmithLead Medical Technician
Claire Liz PhillipsReaper
Matt NolanSgt. Loader
Alex MortensenHangar Officer
Zach Paul BrownHangar Officer #2
Frank ScozzariDaggus Cobalt Miner

Art department​

NameRole
Marcus TaorminaVFX supervisor
Justin RaleighSpecial effects makeup designer
Jared PurringtonIllustrator
Pat PresleyConcept artist
Jason PastranaCostume concept artist
Chris GlennConcept artist
Lee BermejoArtist

Production companies​

CompanyRole
The Stone QuarryProduction
Grand ElectricProduction
NetflixDistribution
Luma PicturesVisual effects
Fractured FX Inc.Makeup & prosthetics
Medieval ArmouryProps
RED Digital CinemaCameras
ZERØ OPTIKCustom camera lenses
Green Meadow GrowersPlants



Concept Art​

Rebel-Moon.jpg

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Behind the Scenes Images​

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My thoughts?

The film is gonna look great. The detail on Djimon Honsou's armor is fantastic.

... Wait a minute....

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... Is that Sora's crown?

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Kingdom Hearts is part of Rebel Moon's continuity, confirmed! /s
 
Last edited:

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021

Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon: Part 2 Is Already In Production

Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon: Part 2 is currently in production and is among the four big-budget films receiving California’s tax credit program subsidies. With $83 million in qualified spending, Rebel Moon: Part 2 will receive an estimated $16,618,000 in tax credits.

In a statement California Film Commission Executive Director Colleen Bell told (Via Deadline) “We are thrilled to continue welcoming the kind of big-budget films that used to be so susceptible to runaway production.” he added, “In addition to our incentive, we have the best talent, crews, infrastructure, locations, weather, and so much more. California is ready to help filmmakers make the most of all we have to offer.”

rebel-moonw.jpg


Rebel Moon is directed by Zack Snyder from a screenplay he co-wrote with Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad, The film is based on a story he also created with Johnstad. Rebel Moon stars Sofia Boutella as Kora, Charlie Hunnam, Ray Fisher as Blood Axe, Djimon Hounsou as General Titu, Anthony Hopkins, Doona Bae, Staz Nair, Alfonso Herrera, Jena Malone, Stuart Martin, Ed Skrein, Cary Elwes, and Corey Stoll.

According to Netflix’s short synopsis, Rebel Moon follows a peaceful colony on the edge of the galaxy that is threatened by the armies of a tyrannical regent named Balisarius. The desperate civilians dispatch a young woman who has a mysterious past to seek out warriors from nearby planets to help them challenge the regent.

Looks like progress is going well on the movie, and the project should be expected to conclude filming in November as estimated.


Pictures:

Zack Snyder on the set of Rebel Moon: "#rebelmoon "low angle""

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Sofia Boutella's pictures on location:

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Photos of a thatched roof village, possibly Kora's home, as suggested in the last picture:

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Anthony Hopkins's character, JC1435 a.k.a. Jimmy, “a sentient JC1435 mechanized battle robot and one-time defender of the slain King.”

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Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021
Sofia Boutella finished her work in Rebel Moon after 152 shooting days, and both parts are wrapped up. She was still seen working out in Zack Snyder's home gym about a week ago, possibly for pickups or reshoots or maybe she just enjoys working out, but Jesus Christ is she gonna be yoked when the movie actually comes out. :ROFL:
 

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021
Nine second teaser for Rebel Moon near the end of Netflix's 2023 showcase.

 

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021

Vanity Fair: Zack Snyder Goes Galactic: Exclusive First Look at Rebel Moon


Zack Snyder is world-building once again with Rebel Moon. This time the 300 and Justice League filmmaker is creating not just one world but a sprawling menagerie of planets, full of cyborg warriors with molten-metal swords, giant half-humanoid arachnids, and ancient robots that seem to have emerged more from medieval times than the future. The new Netflix space saga that Snyder directed and cowrote extends far beyond the verdant orb of the title. That moon is actually one of the more modest worlds. It circles an immense gas giant at a distant edge of the galaxy and is populated mainly by farmers. It's nowhere special, but it’s about to change the balance of power in this fictional universe.

While any sci-fi extravaganza naturally features copious digital effects, Snyder also used his estimated budget of at least $166 million to manifest as much of it in real life as possible. In a Santa Clarita canyon just outside Los Angeles, a full-size abandoned starfighter decays not far from what appears to be an idyllic Scandinavian-style village, complete with clusters of homes, shops, and barns, as well as a stone bridge arching over a crystalline river. (Team Snyder also built the river.) Vast fields of actual wheat sprout from desert hardpan never meant for such lush growth, but Snyder insisted on real crops for his farmers to harvest and defend. Just over the rocky hillside sits another Rebel Moon set for a larger community known as Providence that looks like an Old West metropolis. All of these are just locations on the moon of the title; there are other worlds beyond.

This story, which Snyder has been mulling for more than three decades, focuses on outcasts, malcontents, and refugees from many disparate planets who join forces to rise up together against a punishing authoritarian government. As in real life, uniting so many different factions is easier proposed than accomplished, both in the story and behind the scenes as multiple plotlines entwine. In every way, Rebel Moon is a heavy lift.

“I’m a glutton for punishment. I don’t know why I always make an ensemble movie. I can’t wait to not do that. But in the meantime, of course…I love it,” Snyder says. He feels that constructing his worlds in real life makes the otherworldly feel more immersive. “This movie was me going, ‘Of course it’s a space opera, but let’s not lens it that way. Let’s lens it in a more intimate way, so that the sci-fi elements feel more grounded.’ We’re not always saying, ‘Look at how big our spaceships are or how weird our planets look!’ That happens, but it happens as an organic part of the world you’re in. You’re there, and so the things you see on that journey are not forced upon you or spoon-fed to you.”

FL-RebelMoon-7.jpg

Rebel Moon Lineup: Nemesis (Doona Bae), Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher), Tarak (Staz Nair), Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), Kora (Sofia Boutella), Kai (Charlie Hunnam) and Milius (E. Duffy), and General Titus (Djimon Hounsou.)


Snyder shares these thoughts while sitting in a tavern built on the port city set, sweating profusely as he directs a gunfight sequence. A network of overhead pipes creates a thunderstorm that transforms the desert dust into pools of sticky mud while the heroes and villains blast at each other. When we spoke last summer, Rebel Moon was about halfway through principal photography, with more than three months to go. Snyder couldn’t have looked giddier. After an excruciating, combative experience building the DC superhero universe for Warner Bros.—and then seeing it scrapped—Snyder has finally found a studio that has given him epic trust to match its epic funding.

Debuting on Netflix on December 22, Rebel Moon is not just one movie—it’s already a saga, with plans to split the film into two parts. (That makes the $166 million price tag, estimated from California tax filings, a two-for-one bargain at around $83 million each.) The second part's release date has not yet been settled, but Snyder wants it to follow closely on the heels of the first one. “It won’t be long after. Netflix can do things that a traditional studio can’t do as far as how close together the movies are released," he says.

Also arriving at later dates will be more explicit, harder-edged cuts of the two movies. The first version of Rebel Moon to hit screens will be a fantasy adventure “that anyone can enjoy and watch,” Snyder says. The later cut will be strictly for adults. “I think for fans of mine and people who are ready to take a deeper, harder dive, that’ll be fun for them,” he says.

It’s already fun for him. “Originally, the script was one movie, but it was in ‘Zack form,’” says his wife and longtime producing partner, Deborah Snyder. “It was 172 pages.” Typically, a page of script equals a minute onscreen. So Rebel Moon was shaping up to be approximately three hours long—which worried Netflix film chairman Scott Stuber. “Stuber was like, ‘On the service, under-two-hour movies really do better for some reason,’ even though you’ll binge-watch a series of eight episodes,” Deborah Snyder says. “Zack said, ‘If you ask me to make this less than two hours, I’m going to lose all the character. You won’t care about these people. It’s a character story about how people can change, and redemption, and what are you willing to fight for…’ So he said, ‘What if I give you two movies?’”

If that gamble pays off, there may be many more Rebel Moons to come. It all starts with that nowhere world covered in fields of wheat.

FL-RebelMoon-9.jpg

Kora (Sofia Boutella) and Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) in a rainstorm, work to find fighters to defend their moon from the Imperium.


The moon of Veldt is a David facing down the Goliath of the Mother World, which has amassed abundant wealth, political power, and an immense army. Veldt is nowhere special—until the rulers of the Mother World decide to seize it as a breadbasket.

“They land in the village to say, ‘Listen, you guys will be our local food source while we’re tromping around this part of the galaxy. So how long till the harvest comes in?’ The villagers are pretty much stunned by the brutality, but they don’t realize what level the Mother World’s ready to go to,” Zack Snyder says.

A newcomer named Kora (Sofia Boutella) rallies them to resist rather than roll over. She has been hiding on this moon after fleeing from her own role within the leadership of that oppressive government. (That’s her abandoned starship out beyond the wheat fields.) “The Imperium comes down, and they want to take the women and take the children and they need more soldiers,” Deborah Snyder says. “They’re going to take their food. And [the villagers] go, ‘Look, we can bargain with them.’”

The fugitive hiding in their midst is the only one who knows how foolhardy that is. “Kora used to be in the Imperium, and she’s like, ‘Guys, this ends badly for everybody,’” Zack Snyder says.

FL-Rebel-Moon-BTS-2.jpg

Fields of Gold: Filmmaker Zack Snyder and producer Deborah Snyder behind the scenes on Rebel Moon.


Boutella sees the character as a symbol for the way people ignore or run from the problems in their lives, until they can’t anymore. “She knows the guilt that she’s been living with, and the first step of her redemption is doing something about it instead of going away,” says the actor, best known for Atomic Blonde and playing the title role in 2017’s The Mummy opposite Tom Cruise. “I think that, as much as it is sci-fi, it’s a very human story,” she says.

This humble moon of Veldt is a greater danger than anyone realizes because the Mother World’s grip on its empire is secretly weakening and slipping. “They’ve conquered the universe, they’ve scooped everyone into the empire, and they’ve had to make individual deals with the different leaders of the different worlds. You can imagine how complicated that is. A lot of rulers felt like they made a bad deal, or that their fathers’ fathers made a bad deal. They begin to push back,” Zack Snyder says. “It’s more whispers at first. We’re right on the edge of revolution, and if our villagers are successful, the example of that could spur an even bigger revolt.”

Since these Veldt farmers can’t possibly fight the Imperium alone, Kora sets off with a mercenary starship pilot named Kai (Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam) to find help, since his Tawau-Class freighter is necessary to get them off-world and back again. It's not a ride built for comfort. Very little in Rebel Moon has a high gloss.

“It’s more of a dieselpunk world than a steampunk world,” Snyder says. “There is a sort of higher-energy source than gasoline, since they have a way of jumping across vast swaths of the universe, but the technology hasn’t really changed in quite a while.” Snyder’s universe has become a stagnant one, in part because of the dictatorship weighing down on it and siphoning its resources.

FL-RebelMoon-12.jpg

Charlie Hunnam as the starship pilot Kai, a galactic gun-for-hire, seen here aboard his freighter.


Kora has only a few months to assemble her fighters before the Mother World’s forces return to Veldt to collect their harvest. “The advantage that they would have is, they could set a trap for the Imperium,” Snyder says. “A lot of times, if you’re fighting in a guerrilla war, you don’t know where the bad guys are going to be. But in this case, you know in nine weeks they’re going to be right there. So they could set a pretty insane trap for them. Of course, it all goes sideways. But that’s the initial plan.”

Kora is joined by Gunnar (Michiel Huisman, of Game of Thrones and The Haunting of Hill House), a handsome but meek farmer she has befriended. While the pilot Kai has seen a lot of fighting and knows the back channels to various other guns for hire, Gunnar is naive about the world outside his village. He knows a lot about wheat, though. “There’s a scene where Charlie says, ‘What do you do in the village?’ And Gunnar goes, ‘Well, I’m in charge of the harvest. I catalog seeds.’ Charlie’s like, ‘Oh…okay,’” Snyder says. “In a lot of ways, the whole village, they have a slightly naive view of what the Imperium is capable of. They don’t think they’ll just be murdered by them.”

Sofia Boutella's Kora finds Djimon Hounsou's General Titus living as a gladiator and asks him to fight the Mother World...

Sofia Boutella’s Kora finds Djimon Hounsou’s General Titus living as a gladiator and asks him to fight the Mother World he once defended.


Together, Kora, Kai, and Gunnar recruit the most fearsome, calculating, and deadly warriors they can find on other subjugated worlds. Snyder spells out some of his inspirations: “It’s The Dirty Dozen, The Wild Bunch, The Magnificent Seven—anytime there’s either a village or a town that is threatened, that needs a gunfighter to come and do the dirty work that the townspeople can’t do.”

The first thing the village needs is a general capable of commanding the fighters the group hopes to assemble. That leads Kora to General Titus, played by Djimon Hounsou (Amistad, Guardians of the Galaxy). “She finally tracks him down at this coliseum on a sort of gladiator planet, where he’s drunk and sad and doesn’t want anything to do with anybody,” Snyder says. “She’s trying to convince him to join up. There’s events that happened to him in the past that made him have to leave the Imperium and actually become an enemy of the Mother World. That scarred him.”

Staz Nair as Tarak a barbarianinspired warrior with a royal history who now labors to pay off a lifedebt.

Staz Nair as Tarak, a barbarian-inspired warrior with a royal history who now labors to pay off a life-debt.


Another of the brawlers they seek is Tarak, a character who’s more Tarzan than space warrior. The bare-chested brawler (played by Supergirl and Game of Thrones actor Staz Nair) is in sync with nature to the degree that he can bond with a griffin-like flying beast called a Bennu and ride it into battle. Snyder wanted the members of the squad to each have a distinct style, so Tarak is inspired by Conan the Barbarian and the brawny warriors seen in the art of the iconic sword-and-sorcery illustrator Frank Frazetta.

“When we first meet Tarak, he’s the indentured servant of this rancher, and he’s working the anvil as a blacksmith,” Snyder says. “They ask him if he’ll join, and he’s like, ‘I would love to, but I’m in debt to this guy and I’m going to honor that. That’s the kind of guy I am.’ So they figure out a way to get him to join. His backstory is that he comes from a noble family and they had a run-in with the Mother World. In a lot of ways, all the characters have a bone to pick with the Mother World.”

Bae Doona at the forefront as the swordmaster Nemesis. Behind her from the left Charlie Hunnam's Kai Staz Nair's Tarak a...

Doona Bae at the forefront as a swordmaster named Nemesis. Behind her, from the left: Charlie Hunnam’s Kai, Staz Nair’s Tarak, a local bystander, and Michiel Huisman’s Gunnar.


Another member with an axe to grind actually wields two flaming swords. South Korean actor Doona Bae plays Nemesis, a swordmaster who is partly mechanical. “These swords are powered by the gauntlets that she holds. The gauntlets are these ancient [artifacts] from her home world, and part of the rite of passage of being a warrior in her world is you have to cut your arm off, and then you put these kind of robot arms on. That allows you to wield these molten-metal blades,” Snyder says.
She inhabits a mining world that’s ruled by the Imperium, which extracts everything useful while leaving little for the planet’s inhabitants. “Nemesis is able to navigate the alleys and nooks and crannies, and she’s been sort of protecting the exploited workers of that world,” Snyder says.

Bae Doona as Nemesis a defender of the poor and oppressed and Michiel Huisman's Gunnar a farmer not trained for warfare.

Doona Bae as Nemesis, a defender of the poor and oppressed, and Michiel Huisman’s Gunnar, a farmer not trained for warfare.


The filmmaker reunited with Ray Fisher, his Cyborg actor from the DC films, by casting him alongside Cleopatra Coleman (The Last Man on Earth, Dopesick); the two play Darrian and Devra, a brother-and-sister team known as the Bloodaxes. They are galactic insurgents who have been angering the Mother World with a hit-and-run spree of attacks against the Imperium, without being especially effective at stopping its reign of abuse and terror.

“They fight and hide. They don’t have the resources to have a pitched battle in the wide open,” Snyder says. “They’re kind of just ****ing with supply lines and blowing up train tracks. That’s their kind of thing.”

Ray Fisher as Darien Bloodaxe an insurgent who stages covert attacks on the Mother World's dictatorship.

Ray Fisher as Darien Bloodaxe, an insurgent who stages covert attacks on the Mother World’s dictatorship.


The final human member of the team is Milius, played by newcomer E. Duffy. The character, like the performer, is nonbinary, so the director uses they/them pronouns when describing their backstory. Milius is a refugee from a farming world similar to Veldt—one that chose to cooperate rather than resist, and was subsequently demolished.

“They came from a small farming village that got destroyed, and their people never really stood up. They got slaughtered,” Snyder says.
Milius wants justice for what happened but doesn’t have any special weaponry or training. Snyder says they bring something else to the team. “I think it’s heart,” he says. “That really is their specialty. In a lot of ways, they have the purest motivation to fight. Everyone else is battling some past demon, whereas Milius feels, ‘My world was destroyed, and it was very similar to this world. I didn’t get a chance to defend it, so I choose this one to defend.’”

E. Duffy as the refugee turned resistance fighter Milius with Staz Nair as Tarak in Rebel Moon.

E. Duffy as the refugee turned resistance fighter Milius, with Staz Nair as Tarak in Rebel Moon.


There are even more outlandish characters who enter the fight, among them an ethereal spider-being played by Jena Malone and an ornate, centuries-old robot known as a Jimmy (voiced by Anthony Hopkins). The Jimmys were mechanical knights, relics of a bygone age, now mostly gone. This one endures in the wild, trying to merge the natural world with its mechanical form.

Opposing these heroes is an Imperium enforcer known as Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein), a volatile and cruel emissary from the Mother World with a chip on his shoulder. He serves under Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee, from 2012's Les Misérables and Hawkeye), who presides over this sector of the universe.
Noble, contrary to his name, demonstrates his loyalty and strength with sociopathic indifference. “I’ve played antagonists at points in my career in the past, and I think when I’ve done it well, I’ve been able to add some kind of humanity and some kind of empathy to the characters. This is a bit different,” says the actor, best known for his dastardly characters in Deadpool and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.

“With this character, I pointedly chose to leave humanity out of it completely for the first time,” Skrein says. “I’m not occupied with gaining your empathy. It will be interesting to see what the audience’s reactions are to it. Noble has chosen to exist outside of what he sees as the limitations of morality.”

Ed Skrein as the Mother World enforcer Admiral Noble flanked by two Scribes who record  the dictatorship's history.

Ed Skrein as the Mother World enforcer Admiral Noble, flanked by two Scribes, who record (and distort) the dictatorship’s history.


Accompanying Noble are horrific masked figures known as the Scribes, priests from the religious order that dominates the Mother World. “Their purpose is, they write down information,” Snyder says. But instead of text, they use living human beings as their paper and implant memories and images into them.

“Your DNA stores information,” Snyder explains. “You are put in stasis if you’re a page, and your body just becomes like a hard drive. The Scribes have the ability to transfer what they see. That’s how history is recorded by the Mother World. You can plug into those things later, and you experience the history as a memory. But the Scribes, of course, are manipulated by politics, and they write down only what they’re supposed to.”

It sounds like a fate worse than death, but the Mother World distributes a lot of death as well, usually by way of its Dreadnaught battleships. One such starship that looms large in Rebel Moon is The King’s Gaze. “That ship is a world destroyer. There’s, like, 8,000 soldiers on that ship. They’ve got, like, 200 dropships and 100 tanks, and it has this huge boom-boom howitzer,” Snyder says. “It could raze the surface of a planet. If they just fired on a planet for three days straight, there’d be nothing left. They do that a lot.”

The Scribes are quasireligious figures who have the power to imprint memories in the mind of humans used as living...

The Scribes are quasi-religious figures who have the power to imprint memories in the mind of humans used as living history books.


Snyder knows it’s inevitable that some will label Rebel Moon as “Zack Snyder’s Star Wars.” Tonally, the Netflix film will be radically different from those set in that galaxy far, far away, but it does take place in a distant realm of space. And there is—as the title suggests—a struggling rebellion as well as a brutal dictatorship determined to crush it. “Of course those comparisons are going to be made,” Snyder says. “Anything that has a spaceship in it is going to be: ‘This is blank’s Star Wars.’ So I understand and sort of welcome the comparisons. But at the same time, I do believe that our thing is really an entirely different experience.”

Another reason he’s so accepting of the comparison is…once upon a time, even Snyder thought of Rebel Moon as Zack Snyder’s Star Wars. That’s how he pitched it to Lucasfilm more than a decade ago, just before Disney acquired the company and began making new movies.

“I was in postproduction on Man of Steel,” Snyder says. “I had heard there were rumblings about possibly doing another three [Star Wars] movies at some point. My take was that, if you just let me have the IP, I’ll make this cool movie, and I won’t get in the way of anything that you guys are doing.” In other words, his proposed film would feature original characters and a new storyline that didn’t necessarily impact or disrupt any of the existing Star Wars canon.

Snyder first met with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy shortly before the company’s sale, and he later sat down with Disney’s then studio chief, Alan Horn, after the acquisition. While Snyder felt their reactions to his idea were promising, both the filmmaker and Lucasfilm ultimately decided it wasn’t going to work out.

Rebel Moon director writer and producer Zack Snyder behind the scenes of the twopart Netflix epic.

Rebel Moon director, writer, and producer Zack Snyder behind the scenes of the two-part Netflix epic.


The story proved to be extremely portable. Since Rebel Moon was pitched as something separate from the classic Star Wars storylines, it could survive on its own if need be. Snyder committed to making more DC superhero films—Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the grueling Justice League—while Lucasfilm commissioned a new slate of films closely tied to the original Star Wars trilogy. “I didn’t really have time to do a Star Wars movie,” Snyder admits. “So it kind of worked out.”

But the idea continued to linger, as it had for decades. Snyder began to reimagine Rebel Moon as taking place in an original universe. Ironically, a similar thing happened in the ’70s when George Lucas, unable to secure the film rights to the Flash Gordon stories he loved as a boy, decided to make Star Wars in its own stand-alone world. Rebel Moon was ultimately revived as part of Snyder’s deal with Netflix, which produced the zombie heist-thriller Army of the Dead and its prequel, Army of Thieves.

The details of the film have evolved significantly from his Lucasfilm proposal, but the core of Rebel Moon remains close to the concept he originally crafted as a student in the late ’80s. “The concept came from being at film school. I think I had a pitch class—what would be a cool idea for a movie? And I was like: ‘a defending-the-village space movie,’” Snyder says. “Only afterward, I thought it would fit in the Star Wars universe. Then it went all the way back around,” he continues. “It’s been literally on the back burner for a long time. I don’t even know if the burner was on for a lot of that time.”

Now Rebel Moon is finally a reality. There is pressure to pull off what mainstream Hollywood has lately deemed impossible: introducing an epic world that isn’t already known to audiences, and making it a hit.

Deborah Snyder hopes the project will provide a pathway to new fans who love all the things that inspired it but are yearning for something fresh. “It has a bit of Star Wars. It has a bit of everything,” she says. “It’s a little bit like Lord of the Rings, a little bit Game of Thrones with the palace intrigue. And it’s really just a lot of what’s in Zack’s head.”
 

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021
The first two Rebel Moon movies have new titles and release dates,
Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire is set to release Dec 22 2023, while Rebel Moon: The Scargiver is speculated to release April 2024.

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The world premiere of the Rebel Moon teaser trailer will debut on August 22nd at Gamescom, as well as a "special announcement" rumored to be the tie-in video game.
 

Morgan

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No trailer for the tie-in game, but it was mentioned at Gamescom along with the debut of this trailer.
Twitter in shambles that Snyder isn't as despised as they imagine him to be.
 

berto

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I saw the trailer but I am really confused at what I'm looking at. I'm sure the actual films will be clear and it's not like I'm skipping it. At the very least it'll be a visual treat.
 

Morgan

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I saw the trailer but I am really confused at what I'm looking at. I'm sure the actual films will be clear and it's not like I'm skipping it. At the very least it'll be a visual treat.
Oh yeah, for sure.

But it's funny because not knowing what you're seeing at least means the trailer isn't spoiling the entire plot for you to where you don't want to see it. :p

In that case, reading the following is optional in case you want to actually learn the situation as the movie itself tells it to you and provides the context.

Kora was part of the Imperium but defected to the planet Veldt. The Imperium's landed on Veldt to take its resources as dictatorships tend to do. Kora will leaves to gather the different warriors to fight against the Imperium/the Mother World.

The footage of her later in the trailer raising the red and white flag is a flashback of her time in the Imperium where she was known as "the Scargiver", and she's addressed by that title by Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein—who is NOT playing Balisarius and I have to edit the Credits post soon with the correct info).

The trailer is narrated by Jimmy (Sir Anthony Hopkins) relating a story about Princess Issa (Stella Grace Fitzgerald), "the Redeemer", and how the princess could end wars. She's already dead by the time Rebel Moon takes place. This girl is depicted as blonde and in a snowfield with white clothes later in the teaser, but as Jimmy refers to Princess Issa we instead see a completely different girl on a spaceship. This girl is Young Kora (played by Lila Barad).

General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) is on his knees, it's likely he lost a battle. People are shown with bags over their heads and eyes drawn on the bags. There was some early lore in previous articles about the "Scribes", the priests who serve the Mother World and imprint their memories onto "pages" who are living people. These bag-over-head people are potentially the Pages for the Scribes, since the history they're imprinted with is a memory seen from the eyes of the Scribe(s) that witnessed the event.

People are being led across a field—maybe the same field Jimmy's hand is seen in at the start. An unnamed man blows some wheat off of his hand. A statue is blown up. More people are getting corraled into spaceships while the wheat is set on fire in the background. This looks like standard behavior for the Mother World conquering planets and folding its people into part of the empire by erasing their past and livelihood.

Jimmy talks about having memories of a past he'll never see, loyalty to a king he cannot serve, and love for a child he could not save. The first part of that line is juxtaposed with a king's funeral, possibly the King of the Galactic Empire (Cary Elwes). He's wearing the same white clothing as Princess Issa to tie them together visually. Just before that are two people in black clothes mourning with a white griffin behind them. The part of the line mentioning a child he can't save is juxtaposed with Nemesis carrying a child, but who Jimmy is referring to is Princess Issa herself who was likely killed in an Imperium attack.

Kora alerts the villagers of Veldt of the coming Imperium arrival by hitting a bell. We see another flashback of Even Younger Kora (played by Elizabeth Martinez) alone a town with a Mother World tank destroying everything around her. She was likely kidnapped at that point at 9 years old and indoctrinated into the Imperium. An older Kora (Sofia Boutella this time) is seen in a crowd of similarly dressed soldiers hailing Regent/King Balisarius (Fra Fee). She has the line that she was a child of war and taught that "love is weakness", and it shows her next to a dead soldier who was likely her boyfriend at the time.

Nemesis (Bae Doo-na) is seen talking to Harmada (Jena Malone), who has a child clinging to her. Harmada is known to kidnap children in revenge for losing her own, and Nemesis says there's a difference between justice and revenge. This is likely a recruitment moment that goes sideways as Nemesis and Harmada have a fight over differing ideals—Nemesis is on the side of justice and stopping the Mother World from doing future bad things and making future orphans or worse, while Harmada is working through her grief in a recursive way because her kidnapping children won't exactly stop her from losing the new children or stop the Mother World, to be honest.

Nemesis is seen with her F-off awesome plasma blades as she fights Harmada. Lightsabers and Disney can suck it.

Admiral Noble warns someone, likely Kora, that there's a price for her defiance.

Quick cut to Kai (Charlie Hunnam, who is absolutely not Green Arrow), then quick cut to Tarak (Staz Nair) shouting—he appears to be captured/trapped as he witnesses something off screen, and I'm betting it's an execution of his loved ones or allies. Quick cut to a behind-view of a figure landing on the ground.

A woman is seen jumping off of a building and a man in a hat(?) watches. Some Mother World ships blow things up in the background so this is likely another imperial conquest and the unnamed woman is taking her own way out, so to speak. The next shot is a planet (the same one?) being shot at from space.

Next shot is Milius (E. Duffy) crawling with a knife in their mouth. Next shot is General Titus.

More motherships shoot at a docking station. This station is seen earlier in the trailer but I didn't mention it in chronological order, my bad. But the rebels are seen at this station in the earlier trailer footage as well as a Mother World ship and some scribes, so this scene could be happening after an encounter when Kora and Co are done with whatever they were doing at that location.

Balisarius (Fra Fee, with facial hair) is being crowned and tells his servant(?) to pause while he listens to the cheers outside. This could be either a present scene, or it's a scene from the past meant to correspond to Kora's cheering for him in the flashback.

A shot of Kora piloting a ship is paired with a shot of a ship leaving Veldt partially wrecked, so the ship that's leaving and the one that Kora is piloting could be the exact same ship as she leaves the planet with Kai on a commandeered aircraft, though it could potentially be trailer trickery, who knows.

Ray Porter (formerly Darkseid) says he doesn't want trouble. Kora and Kai reassure him they won't bring any. This is followed by a shot of imperium ships blowing up.

Potentially, the order is that Kai and Kora talk to Porter's villager character first for information, they blow up every ship except one, and they leave on the remaining ship.

There's a montage of other really cool shots like Nemesis with her blades, Tarak asking someone if they're ready, a four-armed figure rallying the people in Tarak's world, Blood Axe (Ray Fisher) being awesome, Tarak in a shot with a really dark griffin creature—possibly a sapient companion or a battle steed of his since he's seen reaching out for it and they're in another shot together where he leaps onto it while it's in midair and they fly off to the middle distance. But if this takes place before or after the shot of Tarak captured and shouting is unclear to me, so R.I.P. to that griffin in advance.

Kora is in her imperium uniform bowing to some figure, not sure who that is.

Jimmy says something like a king is a man, and a man can fail, but a myth will live forever, channeling massive Christopher Nolan vibes.

Jimmy is shown in a field of red lights that turn blue, as he looks at one light and changes it from red to blue, and the blue spreads out to the other lights in the field. This could be him escaping his programming, gaining sentience?

Kora and Admiral Noble have a fight with blue energy blades.

There's a shot of the rebels leaving a ship and walking towards the coliseum in the far distance, and Kora is putting on her large cloak mid stride. This matches an early concept art which showed the ship, figures walking, and the coliseum. This coliseum is seen just a few scenes prior in the trailer getting blown up.

Jimmy asks who's ready to die for what they believe in, while Kora and her crew confront someone offscreen, cue title shot.

Through this trailer breakdown I learned that the casting list is stupendously large for this movie, lmao. I ought to update the first post.

Edit: Actually, this bears mentioning that "Rebel Moon originated as a Star Wars concept" following up on ROTJ, centered around a fresh set of protagonists with no relationships to past SW protags. This was done before Disney purchased Lucasfilm, and the buyout paused the production talks. The second subplot we see in The Force Awakens just after Poe gets the MacGuffin, is Finn, who was indoctrinated at a young age, defecting from the Empire after seeing his friend be killed in front of him. Kora defecting from the Imperium sometime after her lover is killed is a similar beat, and it wouldn't be surprising at all if Disney ripped the idea for Finn's character arc from the initial pitch of Rebel Moon and the intent for Kora, but in Disney fashion, they bungled that hard on top of the focus on legacy characters including Palpatine.
 
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Morgan

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Variety: Netflix Sued Over Canceled Game Deal for Zack Snyder’s ‘Rebel Moon’ Movies


Netflix has been sued for breach of contract by a company that was creating a game based on the forthcoming “Rebel Moon” sci-fi films by Zack Snyder.

In a lawsuit, Evil Genius Games said it had begun working with Netflix in early 2023 to develop a tabletop role-playing game based on “Rebel Moon” with a delivery date to coincide with the first film’s streaming release on Dec. 22, 2023. Evil Genius paid Netflix for a license, with an agreement to share profits — but earlier this year, Netflix terminated the deal, alleging that Evil Genius violated confidentiality agreement for “Rebel Moon,” per the complaint.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, seeks unspecified monetary damages. (Snyder is not named as a defendant in the complaint.) A copy of the lawsuit is available at this link.

Netflix declined to comment.

“Our aim is to ensure our team is recognized for their fantastic work, and that we can release this game for millions of [tabletop RPG] enthusiasts to enjoy,” Evil Genius CEO David Scott said in a statement. “It’s disheartening to see Netflix backpedal on content that was jointly showcased and had received their prior consent. We urge our supporters to contact Netflix and Zack Snyder to push for the release of this game.”

Part 1 of Snyder’s “Rebel Moon,” titled “A Child of Fire,” is scheduled to premiere Dec. 22, with Part 2, titled “The Scargiver,” set to debut April 19, 2024. The film follows an enigmatic young woman (played by Sofia Boutella) who must search for fighters to battle an impending invasion by the despotic ruler Regent Balisarius (Fra Free).

Separately, Netflix has a deal with San Mateo-based Super Evil Megacorp (Vainglory, Catalyst Black) to develop a four-player co-op action video game set in the “Rebel Moon” universe, which will be available exclusively to Netflix members. A release date for the title hasn’t been announced.

Snyder said in a podcast in March 2023 that a tabletop game based on “Rebel Moon” was in the works, “lauding the work of Evil Genius’ team of creators,” according to the games company.

Evil Genius agreed to pay Netflix an upfront licensing fee of $7,500, followed by payments of $7,500 by Feb. 1, 2024, and $10,000 by Feb. 1, 2025, as well as to “share profits derived from the Licensed Articles with Netflix,” the lawsuit says.

According to its lawsuit, Evil Genius halted other projects to focus on the “Rebel Moon” game. By May, Evil Genius said, it had produced a 228-page World Bible (which vastly expanded on the universe envisioned by Snyder), a 430-page Player’s Guide and a 337-page Game Master’s Guide. According to the lawsuit, the initial script for “Rebel Moon” was “missing background information vital to the story as a whole and to the world,” and Evil Genius filled in “all the missing pieces” along with “a cohesive backstory for the entire Rebel Moon franchise.”

On May 25, 2023, Netflix terminated the agreement with Evil Genius, claiming Evil Genius had violated confidentiality provisions in its contract by sharing artwork at an industry trade show one month earlier, according to the complaint. In the lawsuit, Evil Genius said the termination came as a surprise because it had sent the artwork to Netflix in advance of the event, the Game Manufacturers Association Exposition (GAMA), and Netflix had approved its use. Documents containing the artwork were handed out to retailers at GAMA by Evil Genius’ staff and two Netflix employees, the lawsuit asserts.

Two weeks later, Netflix notified Evil Genius that all of its work on the project “belongs solely and exclusively to Netflix,” according to the lawsuit. “It became clear that Netflix was simply using the alleged breach and termination to hijack [Evil Genius’] intellectual property and prevent [Evil Genius] from releasing the game,” the suit says.

Evil Genius Games, a Black-owned game publisher, was founded in 2021. Its flagship product is the &D-based Everyday Heroes, which it describes as “the ultimate modern-day gaming platform.” The company sells games based on movies including “The Crow,” “Escape From New York,” “Highlander,” “Kong: Skull Island,” “Total Recall,” “Rambo,” “Pacific Rim” and “Universal Soldier.”



Lawsuit can be found here: https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Evil-Genius-v-Netflix.pdf

Edit: As of the claims within the lawsuit and mentioned in the Variety article, some things remain to be confirmed.

Per the suit, "In addition to Rebel Moon themed sequels, television shows, graphic novels, and other potential content and merchandise, Mr. Snyder expressly requested that there be a Rebel Moon based TTRPG. To Mr. Snyder, a TTRPG was critical to the development of the entire Rebel Moon universe since it would provide content for future Rebel Moon derivatives."

"As soon as Plaintiff caught wind that Netflix was looking to release a Rebel Moon based TTRPG, it started working on a pitch, given its prominence in the
TTRPG industry. This included creating mock cover art and character illustrations for the game, developing some potential story lines, and even producing a miniature TTRPG that Netflix executive could play at the pitch. Netflix and Mr. Snyder were blown away. The parties met multiple times thereafter to discuss the project in detail and negotiate the terms of their partnership. Eventually, Plaintiff and Netflix executed a written Overall Merchandising License Agreement (the “Agreement”) on March 22, 2023, which was made effective as of February 1, 2023."


True? Potentially.

In the March 19th, 2023 podcast with The Nerd Queens (video is timestamped), Snyder said, “The one thing that I’m having a really good time with – and I don’t really know if I’m supposed to talk about it – is this RPG that we’re doing that is just literally insane, and so immersive and so intense and so huge, [...] There’s more coming, but all I’ll say is that it was pitched to me – because I’ve always wanted to do an RPG – like, ‘well, we could do it at this scale, or we could do it at ridiculous scale. And I was like, 'ridiculous scale is clearly the scale that we should be doing it.'

The same is attested within the lawsuit, quote included, timestamped video included.

Snyder's "It was pitched to me – because I’ve always wanted to do an RPG" corroborates EG's "[Plaintiff] started working on a pitch", and his speaking of it on March 19th fits in with the execution of the Agreement taking place on March 22nd. Though Zack didn't explicitly name the developer and sources like Polygon confirmed it was an "as of yet unnamed developer", it was still confirmed to be an RPG of massive scale. A video-game RPG would be not very feasible to produce so timely, but a "228-page World Bible [...] a 430-page “Player’s Guide” and 337-page “Game Master’s Guide”" totaling 990-1000 pages of content is of great scale.

The artwork for the Gamemasters Guide and Player Handbook was made public in May via the SnyderNetflix account, and reports of the TTRPG being cancelled entirely was rumored in July from the same account. Per the lawsuit and Variety, the cancellation was made known to the plaintiff on May 25th.

However, the lawsuit makes clear that the GAMA event was held from April 24-27th, and the panel for the Rebel Moon TTRPG was held that Wednesday the 26th. The presentation was led by Dave Scott, the Evil Genius Games' CEO, and Joe Lawson, the head of Publishing at Netflix. The GAMA EXPO site book was published March 29th, 2023, so this was well-planned ahead of time and attendees were notified of who would be present a month+ before the event. See here:

Screenshots_2023-09-28-16-13-32.png


Source: https://issuu.com/fahy-williamspublishing/docs/23_gama_site_book_digimag, page 82.

There was an NDA in place for footage of the movie itself.

The phrase “lauding the work of Evil Genius’ team of creators,” presented by Variety as if a direct claim within the suit made by Evil Genius Games, appears nowhere inside the lawsuit. The closest claim approximating the phrase is "Mr. Snyder (and multiple Netflix executives) routinely praised the company’s work".

Is it a breach of contract and of confidentiality on the part of Evil Genius?

IMO, unlikely. The notion that Netflix would execute a merchandising agreement with Evil Genius on March 22nd, and that their head of Publishing agreed to have his name attached to an event confirmed and publicized on March 29th, then be present at the event a month later on April 26th, only for Netflix to do a 180 on the revelation of information at that same event and terminate the contract on May 25th shows a series of rather ridiculous actions by Netflix supposing that Evil Genius surprised them with the panel at the event they knew about and with artwork they approved. But Netflix has enough money for this to not matter, so Evil Genius Games will need a good paper trail and video evidence to make this clear on their side.
 
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Morgan

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About two hours ago, Zack announced on Twitter that Rebel Moon is expanding with a prequel comic, House of the Bloodaxe, to be published by Titan Comics on January 10 2024.

Cover art can be [seen here], with a synopsis and a sample of additional art within the comic [here].

The official novelization of the first Rebel Moon has a cover as well, [here].

Rebel Moon posters were shown off by SnyderNetflix on Twitter. [Stand Together In Battle], [Nemesis], [Jimmy Fireflies], [Kora Glitch], [Ship Specs], [Kora Rebel Hero], and [Protector of the Faith].

Posters, badges, and other merchandise is being sold on Pyramid International and similar sites.
 

Morgan

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A reminder that the combined budget of Parts 1 and 2 of Rebel Moon is $166M, split at $83M per movie.

:cool:
 

Morgan

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Watched Rebel Moon the day after release.

Great, would definitely recommend the rated R cut for those that can stomach it and want 3 hours of Snyder's work and not 2, but thats coming out in 2024, so for now the PG-13 cut exists as a perfectly serviceable cut that the family can watch (depending on personal discretion). It's pretty noticeably bloodless in scenes that would demand some gore, for instance.

If you want the Rated R cut early, the novelization of Rebel Moon written by V. Castro is based off of that original script, and features such things as Admiral Noble getting intimate with a tentacled creature which is unironically great, Star Wars would literally never. Snyder wears his Heavy Metal Magazine influences on his sleeve for that one (namely "The Long Tomorrow" by Moebius and Dan O’Bannon, among other tales).
 

Morgan

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The Atlantic: Zack Snyder, The Director People Love to Hate

How did one of Hollywood’s most successful and influential filmmakers also become one of its most divisive?

By Dave Itzkoff

One july morning, at a cavernous soundstage on Sunset Boulevard, amplified sound effects boomed so loudly that the walls trembled. On a massive projection screen, futuristic vehicles zipped across alien skies; laser blasts reduced strange architecture to rubble; knives sliced through flesh; an authoritarian army celebrated an unknown triumph. An android with the majestic voice of Anthony Hopkins asked, “Who among you is willing to die for what you believe?”

The footage had been spliced together to create a teaser trailer for Rebel Moon, a science-fiction epic directed by Zack Snyder. Snyder smiled with satisfaction, though he also had notes. “You know what would be cool?” he said to colleagues who were sitting behind an elaborate audio-mixing console. “Is there a way to have it go BOOOOOOOOM and then vroom, have this kind of shock wave?” He watched a giant spaceship drift through the cosmos. Affecting the British accent of the Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel, Snyder said proudly, “These trailers go to 11.”

Snyder likes his movies loud and unambiguous. He naturally speaks the language of the big-budget blockbuster: pugnacious, macho, in-your-face. A film critic once described him as “an adrenaline junkie forever jonesing for a fix.” In fact, he’s one reason so many blockbusters look and sound the way they do: Snyder helped establish the template for comic-book movies as they evolved from summertime popcorn fare into ubiquitous year-round spectacles.

“There’s no superhero science-fiction film coming out these days where I don’t see some influence of Zack,” Christopher Nolan, the Oppenheimer director who has worked with Snyder as a producer, told me. “When you watch a Zack Snyder film, you see and feel his love for the potential of cinema. The potential of it to be fantastical, to be heightened in its reality, but to move you and to excite you.”

Snyder first found success as a director with his 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s classic zombie movie Dawn of the Dead, and with adaptations of the graphic novels 300 (2006) and Watchmen (2009). He then spent several years at Warner Bros. bringing the DC comic-book universe to the screen. His DC movies, including Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, worshipped their spandexed protagonists like deities. They were full of gleaming surfaces, sharp edges, and operatic fight sequences.

Snyder’s fans appreciate the director’s reverence for their comic-book heroes, and the merciless, often bloody worlds he creates for those heroes to inhabit. But Snyder is an unusually divisive filmmaker. His detractors accuse him of making visually bleak, narratively muddled movies. Unlike Nolan, whose brooding Batman trilogy was praised by critics, Snyder has grown accustomed to tough reviews. “Snyder is an overkill director,” Wesley Morris wrote in his review of Man of Steel. “He does bloated masculinist spectacle: Baz Luhrmann with ankle weights.” Reed Tucker, the author of Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC, told me that claiming to be a Snyder fan has become a “sort of political statement, almost. It’s like you’re a Trump fan or something.”

Snyder’s reputation as the bard of heroic manhood is by now so established that he’s become a cultural punch line. In Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Snyder is the butt of a joke about the dude-bro obliviousness of the Kens: When one Barbie snaps out of the stupor that spread through Barbieland after it was overtaken by Kens, she says, “It’s like I’ve been in a dream where I was somehow really invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League.”

If Snyder himself has some stereotypically dude-bro traits, he’s unapologetic about them. A set for Rebel Moon, which he directed and co-wrote, was decorated with a motivational sign that read feeling very zacktivated. When I met him this past summer, he was refurbishing a vintage Land Rover. Yet Snyder doesn’t see his movies as particularly ideological or political, and he’s mystified by how controversial he’s become. “Everyone’s like, You’re a polarizing figure,” he told me. “You know, Love him or hate him … I’m like, Love him or hate him? What did I do? How did I get hate him?”

One answer is that the movie business has changed considerably in recent years, as have moviegoers’ tastes. Disney’s Marvel unit is experiencing an identity crisis amid declining box-office numbers. DC movies such as The Flash and Black Adam—direct descendants of Snyder’s films, in both their aesthetic and their casting choices—have likewise flopped. Audiences seem burned out on the turbocharged adventures of comic-book crime fighters; the movies they left their homes to see this year told the stories of a Mattel doll and a nuclear physicist.

“I have the same fatigue,” Snyder told me. Comic-book adaptations, he said, are “a cul-de-sac now,” no longer interested in, or capable of, telling self-contained stories. “No one thinks they’re going to a one-off superhero movie.”

This may seem, then, like an inauspicious moment to give Zack Snyder a $166 million budget. Yet that’s what Netflix has done with Rebel Moon. It’s a bet that there is still a market for his bombastic style of storytelling. A big bet: The movie is sufficiently sprawling that it is being released in two parts. The first, subtitled A Child of Fire, will start streaming on December 21; the second, The Scargiver, is planned for next April.

Rebel Moon is a space opera about a lunar colony defying an oppressive intergalactic empire and the band of adventurers who aid the colonists in their fight. Unlike most of Snyder’s previous projects, it’s not an adaptation of someone else’s intellectual property; it emerged from his own imagination. That might help free the project from comic-book fatigue, though it also presents new challenges: Rebel Moon has no built-in fan base in the way Watchmen and Man of Steel did. “We’re a new studio, so we don’t have 100 years of library titles,” Ori Marmur, Netflix’s vice president of original studio film, told me. “And if we’re going to build our own, we really have to be willing to lean into some risk.”

Snyder, for one, is confident that he can create a fan base. His professed franchise-fatigue notwithstanding, he is already thinking about a Rebel Moon sequel and preparing a video-game spin-off, along with, yes, a graphic novel. But does the world want more Zack Snyder?

Snyder has a trim, muscular build and a stubbly salt-and-pepper beard. He was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but moved around a lot as a kid; his father worked in human resources for a series of big companies. Along the way, he developed a love of fantasy and science-fiction. He was 11 when the original Star Wars came out, and it captivated him. He was also fascinated by The Twilight Zone, with its forthright morality tales; the illicit, adult exploits chronicled in Heavy Metal magazine; and the stylized violence of Akira Kurosawa. When he was in junior high in Dallas, Snyder remembers going alone to see a Kurosawa retrospective. “My parents just dropped me off at the theater,” he said. “And I can remember going in there and coming out feeling like, You’re a weirdo. No one had an interest in coming in with me.” At school, Snyder never fit neatly into a single group or category; he was the film geek who made his own movies but also an athlete who struggled in the classroom.

Then, in 1980, his 19-year-old brother, Sam, was in a car accident and died from his injuries. Zack was 13. He attended the same school and summer camp that Sam had gone to, and felt Sam’s shadow looming. His brother “almost had a cult status in these places,” Snyder said. When it came to Sam, “everything had mythological consequences.”

After high school, Snyder spent a year studying painting in London, then moved to Los Angeles and got a degree in film. He started directing music videos and commercials, which benefited, in the eyes of his clients, from his unsubtle style: In a post-9/11 Super Bowl spot, for instance, Budweiser’s Clydesdales bend down in homage at the sight of the New York skyline. He met his wife, Deborah, then an advertising producer, when she hired him to direct a Reebok commercial. She’s been a producer on all his films since 300. Zack has her name tattooed on his right forearm.

When he began pitching himself as a feature-film director, Snyder quickly found his angle. “My tactic in a meeting was, I would say to whatever studio I was at, ‘Do you guys own any IP that you can’t crack? That you can’t figure out how to reboot or make work? Let me try,’” he told me. He brought a marketer’s approach to filmmaking. “I wasn’t afraid to sell the thing that needed to be sold,” he said. “It’s the movie business. It’s not the movie charity.”

In 2004, the same year he and Deborah were married, Snyder released his remake of Dawn of the Dead. Directed by Snyder and written by James Gunn, Dawn of the Dead is an unrelenting bloodbath with manic pacing, zombies that move at breakneck speed, and—unlike the original, which Romero intended as a dark riff on American consumerism—little interest in broader social commentary. Even so, its vision of global apocalypse clearly landed with audiences. The movie was a $100 million hit. One reviewer wrote that “it combines a video-game sensibility with cartoonish, whacked-out violence.” Its success helped reawaken a cultural appetite for zombie carnage.

Snyder proved to have a knack for asserting his own creative vision within the bounds of someone else’s mythological world. Eric Newman, the producer who brought Snyder on to make Dawn of the Dead, once heard Snyder compare populist moviemaking to an article of clothing you might buy at Urban Outfitters—say, a reproduction of a vintage Rolling Stones concert T-shirt. As Newman explained, “It’s frayed here and it’s distressed there and it’s been sort of aged … and there’s a pretense that you were there. You were a part of this thing, and you don’t even consider, let alone mind, that there’s a warehouse somewhere with thousands of these exact same shirts.” Not every director would be so comfortable making the cinematic equivalent of a faux-vintage concert tee. Snyder embraced it.

In 2009, Snyder made Watchmen, a superhero adventure adapted from the groundbreaking graphic novel set in a grimy, fallen world far less cartoonish than Metropolis or Gotham. Its inhabitants, even the superheroic ones, experience angst and impotence, they bleed and die, and in the end they largely fail to stop the machinations of the story’s villain. Released one year after the cheeky Iron Man kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Snyder’s Watchmen established him as a kind of antithesis to the Marvel sensibility: violent and unironic where Marvel was light on its feet and winkingly self-aware.

In 2010, Warner Bros. hired Snyder to direct Man of Steel, its reboot of the Superman franchise. Greg Silverman, a former Warner Bros. executive who helped select Snyder for Man of Steel, said he saw an alignment between the director and the material. Snyder, with his earnestness and his fixation on the dueling forces of good and evil, was “the closest we had to Superman on the lot in the form of a director,” Silverman told me.

Man of Steel, which starred the square-jawed British actor Henry Cavill as Superman, was indeed earnest: In one scene, he tells Lois Lane that the unmistakable letter S emblazoned on his suit is actually a Kryptonian symbol meaning “hope.” Nor was the film particularly subtle in presenting its hero as a savior of mankind—one shot foregrounded Superman in front of a stained-glass-window depiction of Jesus. In typical Snyder fashion, the movie was also extremely gory.

For many viewers, Snyder’s faith in superheroes, and macho brutality, felt like an odd match for the cultural mood; that same year, Marvel’s sly, quippy Iron Man 3 ended its run in theaters as one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Some accused Snyder of forgetting the central pillar of the genre’s appeal: fun.

The movie was harshly reviewed, and made about half as much as Iron Man 3. Still, the studio decided to push ahead with the Snyder aesthetic. A 2016 sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, featured Ben Affleck as a burned-out, vengeful Bruce Wayne. Even for audiences that had embraced the dour modernism of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, it was hard to stomach Snyder’s movie, in which the two title heroes spent much of the movie’s runtime disliking and punching each other. BvS reportedly fell short of Warner Bros.’ lofty box-office expectations.

Still, if Snyder had misread the mainstream appetite for a certain kind of superhero fare, he’d found an unusually loyal and ardent group of supporters. On Twitter and Reddit, they raved about his DC movies and clamored for more. Man of Steel and BvS offered just the sort of broken-down, morally paralyzed, hypermasculine portrayals of their characters that hard-core Snyder fans had come to crave.

Snyder’s next project, Justice League, might have been the apotheosis of his approach to the superhero genre. Intended as DC’s answer to The Avengers, Marvel’s 2012 blockbuster, it united Superman (resurrected after an untimely demise in BvS) with Batman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman. But Snyder was forced to stop his work on Justice League after a personal tragedy. His daughter Autumn, then 20 years old, died by suicide in March 2017. Snyder withdrew from the film to grieve with his family. During this period, he and Deborah spent time traveling and thinking deeply about how to return to filmmaking. Autumn, who’d also been a writer, had a habit of signing correspondence with a quote from the novelist Chuck Palahniuk: “The goal isn’t to live forever. The goal is to create something that will.” With that in mind, Snyder decided to press on. “Because my life isn’t separated from the work, it’s cathartic,” he told me.

Joss Whedon, the writer-director of The Avengers, ended up finishing Justice League. The version that hit theaters was criticized for its uneasy mix of Snyder’s stark seriousness and Whedon’s more tongue-in-cheek tone, and the movie was ultimately a commercial failure. (To this day, Snyder maintains that he has never watched this cut of the film, for which he still received directorial credit.)

Snyder diehards were also unhappy with the pastiche of styles that hit theaters. On social media, they began pushing to see Snyder’s full, unaltered version of the film. One fan commissioned a plane with a banner that read wb #releasethesnydercut of justice league to fly over Comic-Con in San Diego. Warner Bros. asked Snyder if he would indeed be interested in releasing his own cut of the movie on the fledgling HBO Max streaming service. Because many elements of his film, including the score and special effects, were still incomplete, the studio reportedly spent an estimated $20 million to $30 million to let Snyder finish the movie as he intended. After what he and Deborah had been through, Snyder told me, getting the chance to complete Justice League was a “soul-mending exercise.” The 2021 film, officially titled Zack Snyder’s Justice League, was four hours long, more than two hours longer than the previous version.

Many critics experienced that scale as an assault on their sensibilities. “It is a grind, it is a slog, it is a bore,” wrote The New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “It’s a mental toothache of a movie, whose ending grants not so much resolution as relief.” But Snyder’s fans thrilled to the movie’s elaborate new battle scenes, its grandiosity. As one wrote in a review on Metacritic: “Was 4 years too long a time to see our favorite superhero team rightfully done on the cinematic screen? Maybe for some, but for me and many others it was well worth the wait, for proving all the doubters wrong.”

When we first met, Snyder had recently weaned himself off the multiplayer combat video game Fortnite. He’d started playing to bond with his youngest son, Cash, who is 11. Soon, he found himself playing even after Cash clocked out. Eventually his gaming became obsessive. “I’d get up, it would be 5:30, 6 in the morning and he’d be there on the game,” Deborah told me. So he quit and took up pottery instead. He wasn’t very good at making coffee mugs, but with pottery, he said, “at least you get something at the end.”

Snyder owes his filmmaking career to his ability to stay in touch with the Fortnite side of himself: the part that loves the visceral, schoolboy thrills of big explosions and grisly battle scenes; the part that likes his storylines to have life-and-death stakes and black-and-white morality.

The Snyders’ home offices, in the hills of Southern California, are a sleek complex of intersecting boxes, with clean, white interiors and floor-to-ceiling windows. When I visited, Zack took a phone call while Deborah showed me the private screening room where their children had recently started watching all the Star Wars movies. Outside was a shipping container that Zack had turned into his private gym, filled with complicated exercise equipment I didn’t recognize and a poster for John Boorman’s Arthurian fantasy film Excalibur.

When Zack finished his call, we settled into his personal workspace. Here, Snyder became a somewhat different man. He put a Philip Glass record on an expensive-looking turntable and rhapsodized about his love for the architecture of Greene and Greene, the California design firm whose work includes the early-20th-century American Craftsman landmark Gamble House, in Pasadena. “There was a moment where I thought I could be a docent at the Gamble House and give tours, because I do have very fair working knowledge of their architectural style,” Snyder said. “I very much am a frustrated architect. I hate to say that I would have been an architect, because I have too much respect for the field.”

An enthusiastic “camera dork,” Snyder pulled out some of his Polaroid gear and sifted through boxes of photos he’d taken, a mixture of portraits of his film actors in their superhero costumes and candid pictures of his children. “I would take a picture of Ben Affleck or my 8-year-old son with the same sort of drama,” he said. “The truth is, my son represents, for me, a much more intensely mythological place.” In conversation, Snyder returns again and again to that word, mythological; it seems tied to his general obsession with origins, with the foundational stories behind personal greatness and strength. I asked Snyder if his origins as a filmmaker might be traced to his brother Sam’s death, and a formative need to measure up to him. “I think that would be a fair assessment,” he said.

Is there still an appetite for the kind of stories Snyder likes to tell? Mythic tales in which men—Snyder’s heroes are almost exclusively men—do cosmic battle with the forces of darkness? When we spoke over the summer, he had recently watched Barbie, a blockbuster as un-Snyder-like as one could imagine. “It’s good. It’s fine—by the way, even with its mention of Zack Snyder,” he said. “I have no issue being that deep in the zeitgeist.” (I reached out to Gerwig to ask about the origin story of the Snyder line, but a publicist told me, “I’m not sure it makes sense for her to participate in a profile on Zack.”)

Snyder insists that he has moved on from making comic-book films. James Gunn, Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead collaborator, has since made the hit Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel. He’s now writing and directing a new Superman movie for DC, planned for 2025, and helping to shape DC Studios’ overall strategy as a co-chief executive. “I’m not knocking on James Gunn’s door, going, like, ‘Bro, shoot me one of those sweet movies,’” Snyder said. “The holy grail is some original IP that you create, that has resonance and is cool.”

Snyder had been sitting on the concept for Rebel Moon for decades. It’s a personal project for him, both because it pays tribute to cultural artifacts he loves—movies such as The Dirty Dozen and The Magnificent Seven—and in its themes. It’s about trying to come back from loss; about the ultimate triumph of misunderstood good guys over evil.

Yet even this new project has roots in old IP. If Rebel Moon sounds like it could be a Star Wars movie, that’s because Snyder tried several years ago to pitch it to Lucasfilm as a potential R-rated entry in that franchise. As he explained, “The Star Wars audience, they’ve grown up. They’re adults now. And it would be cool to make movies for them.” Snyder said there was some interest in his idea until Lucasfilm was purchased by Disney. “When the acquisition happened, there were discussions of, like, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll make your movie, like down the liiiiiiiine,’” he said. “And I was like, ‘Okay, whatever.’”

Netflix proved more amenable. “When we asked him to really think big,” said Marmur, the Netflix executive, “that’s when Rebel Moon showed up.” The hope, he said, is for Netflix to continue attracting filmmakers who want to start their own franchise, showing them that “you can come here and you can make the first installment of something, as opposed to the fourth, fifth, sixth installment.”

Snyder’s commercial instincts—that willingness to sell the thing that needs to be sold—have always led some to dismiss him as a cynical filmmaker. But part of what makes Snyder unique in Hollywood is that his passion for swashbuckling mass entertainment is totally sincere. Even certain critics who have never fully endorsed Snyder’s work have pushed back on the notion that it is soulless. In his review of Snyder’s Justice League cut, New York’s Bilge Ebiri wrote:

Snyder wholeheartedly embraces this stuff, and there’s nothing cynical about his indulgence: He believes that superheroes directly tie into our ancient myths and religious symbols, and he wants to make the rest of us believe, too. He repeatedly goes overboard with the ritual and the portent and the stone-faced gravity, but it’s hard not to respect the guy; nobody has bought into the superhero ethos more than he has. These are not paycheck gigs for him. This is about as personal as it gets.

Ebiri saw in the movie’s stories of parents trying to save their children, and children trying to save their parents, a powerful account of sacrifice and tragedy: “The Snyder Cut has its share of problems—when you get the best of Snyder, you also get the worst—but it’s an undeniably passionate and moving work. It earns its self-importance,” he wrote. I recently asked Ebiri for his sense of Snyder’s place in contemporary Hollywood. “I actually want there to be more Zack Snyders than fewer Zack Snyders,” he told me. “That sounds crazy to say that. I’m probably going to get arrested for saying that. I think the world of blockbuster filmmaking would benefit from more people like Zack Snyder, who take this stuff really seriously.”

One afternoon, I joined Snyder in the office where he was editing Rebel Moon. In the center of the table where we sat were statuettes of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. Feeling, perhaps, the rush of his new project nearing completion, Snyder wondered whether the movie industry’s obsession with strip-mining old source material might be approaching an end. “I mean, like, how much IP is there?” he said.

Quickly, though, he thought of another enduring intellectual property he might like to tackle one day, and his eyes lit up: James Bond. “It’d be cool to see, like, 20-year-old James Bond,” he told me. “The humble roots that he comes from. Whatever trauma of youth that makes you be able to be James Bond,” he said. His voice rose with excitement: “There has to be something there.”
 

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The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Rebel Moon’ Star Ed Skrein Talks “Hard-Core” Director’s Cuts and Olivia Colman Inspiration

An R-rated version of the film will eventually hit Netflix — and the actor notes the violence may surprise people: "the shadow of the Snyder Cut looms large."

BY BRIAN DAVIDS
DECEMBER 27, 2023 12:43PM

'Rebel Moon' star Ed Skrein


[This story contains spoilers for Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire]

Rebel Moon star Ed Skrein has created his most memorable villain yet in Admirable Atticus Noble, and he found inspiration from the unlikeliest source: Olivia Colman.
Alongside Sofia Boutella’s Kora, the English actor is the de facto co-lead of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon ensemble, as his Admiral Noble commandeers the Veldt farming village that Kora, a former Imperium soldier turned fugitive, now calls home. This hostile takeover prompts Kora to put together a team to combat Noble and his vast army, and so it quickly becomes apparent that the two-part Netflix film series will center on Noble and Kora’s blood feud. And considering that Noble’s body has android-like modifications, their surface-level dynamic is somewhat similar to Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, but instead of going to that obvious place for inspiration, Skrein took a major left turn.

“I adopted this sing-songy, almost thespian voice. So I thought that would be intriguing and interesting and against type, and I actually based that voice on Olivia Colman,” Skrein tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I thought that would really throw things off to almost hear her voice coming out of my mouth. I don’t how she’d feel about being a part of such a horrible tyrant, but it was out of respect.”

What makes Skrein’s latest turn all the more impressive is that he was cast at the very last minute, as Rupert Friend had to exit the role due to the pandemic’s industrywide impact on schedules. So Skrein used the short runway that he had to trust his instincts, and before he knew it, he was on set for the first time, filming the climactic scene with all the rebels ensnared on Gondival.

“It was a baptism by fire, but that’s all right. That’s what we do,” Skrein says. “I’m sure Rupert [Friend] would’ve done an incredible job with this, and if I couldn’t have done it or my visa hadn’t worked out, then someone else would’ve done an incredible job. I’ve replaced actors in the past and actors have replaced me. This is the nature of the game.”

Case in point, Skrein’s Rebel Moon co-star Michiel Huisman took his place as Daario Naharis on Game of Thrones season four (through season six), and while Skrein’s exit was more complicated than just his starring role in The Transporter Refueled, the situation is water under the bridge between the two actors.

“There were no awkward standoffs with him or anyone in the cast. Michiel is a good dude. He’s a really good dude, and I loved spending time with him on set,” Skrein says. “So that’s the way it goes. People will replace me in the future and I will replace other people in the future, and I’ll be a gentleman about it at all times.”

Below, during a recent spoiler conversation with THR, Skrein also discusses what viewers can expect from the “hard-core” extended cuts of Rebel Moon Part One and Two, as well as space hookahs, tentacle-related pleasure and astral planes.

Well, I dug the introduction to the world of Rebel Moon, but I can’t stop thinking about the unadulterated cut.

Yeah, that was always going to be part of the dynamic of structuring it in this way. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember anyone ever doing this before, especially shooting two different movies and a PG-13 and a R-rated version. Knowing what we shot for the R-rated version, Zack and Netflix did an incredible job of putting together the PG-13 version. So it was always an interesting proposition to see what they did with the PG-13 cut, and I was really pleased. I feel like it’s a really strong piece, but the shadow of the Snyder Cut looms large. My son is 12 years old, and he came to the London premiere and loved it. I also brought my godson, my nephew and his best mate, and they loved it, because [the PG-13 cut] is really for that demographic. I feel it has the potential to be something seminal for that demographic. But the R-rated version, the Snyder Cut, “the extended cut,” as we’re supposed to call it, has the potential to be something seminal for the older generation.

When I watch something, I just want to see something new. I don’t need to love something. I don’t need to find it perfect. I can see flaws in it, whether it’s a painting, a song or a film, but if it’s new, then I come away and say, “Wow, that was great. That made me feel something.” So you’re going to see something ****ing new in that R-rated cut, and we’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve seen Lars von Trier push cinema to the edges. We’ve seen Saw and Hostile and all those kinds of movies push violence quite far for a commercial entity, and of course, we’ve seen what we did with Deadpool. That film pushed the superhero genre to another place, but there was still comedy involved in that. But this **** is not funny. This is ****ed-up empires in space and evil human nature evolving and playing out on an intergalactic level. It’s hard core.

Did you knowingly shoot PG-13 takes and R-rated takes?

No, but some scenes by nature lent themselves to the R-rated cut. There are some scenes that are not in the movie, and while we were doing it, I could have told you that they weren’t going to be in it. It was like, “How could you cut this scene for a 12-year-old?” There are other scenes where it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t change whatsoever. But then there are other scenes, like Noble’s bedchamber. I’m so messed up, because I remember that it was numbered as scene 31. When I shot that scene, I pushed it quite far in some of the takes, but they cut around it in this one. So, in the extended cut, it’ll feel different, but it was all the same takes, although I swore like a sailor in certain takes. Zack would then say, “OK, now let’s get one without swearing, just so we’re safe for the PG-13.”

Your way onto this project was rather interesting. The pandemic upended schedules across the industry, and so you replaced Rupert Friend rather late in the game. Was it a whirlwind? Did it happen as quickly as it sounds?

Yeah, it happened very quickly. I spoke to Zack while sitting in this exact spot in East London on a Thursday, and by Sunday, I was in L.A. By Monday, I was at the studio. By Thursday, I flew back home to pack my bags and get my visa sorted, and a week after that, I was out in L.A. again. A couple days after that, I was shooting my first scene, which involved all of the rebels. Everyone was lined up in front of me in that end scene where they’re all tied up. So it was a baptism by fire, but that’s all right. That’s what we do. It was exciting for it to be so fast, and I’m very philosophical about this stuff. I’m sure Rupert would’ve done an incredible job with this, and if I couldn’t have done it or my visa hadn’t worked out, then someone else would’ve done an incredible job. I’ve replaced actors in the past and actors have replaced me. This is the nature of the game, and all of that is to say that I’m very grateful that I was able to play this part. Noble was a pretty incredible character to play, even if it was pretty tough.

You’re essentially playing the unmasked Darth Vader of this universe, so this was quite a fortunate turn of events for you. It reminds me of when you relinquished that Hellboy role in the name of culturally accurate representation, and I remember thinking at the time that you’d earned some good karma. I know you didn’t give up the Hellboy role to curry favor for other roles, but maybe Rebel Moon is a byproduct of that good karma.

I don’t think it’s as specific as this case, but I’m a good dude. I live my life honestly. I really don’t like to lie about anything. I’m a peaceful person, and I really try to put in the good karma. There’s a boxing trainer called Joby Clayton who’s always talking about putting in the good karma, and I really try to do that. And putting in the good karma means not expecting things in return. Living life with good karma means going to sleep peacefully at night and waking up peacefully in the morning, regardless of whether you have positive things coming to you or challenges coming to you. So I always just try to put in the good karma and be a good person, and I’ve noticed that good things come back like that. I’ve also noticed it vice versa. If you’re in a negative headspace, negative stuff happens.

(Featured L-R) Alfonso Herrera as Cassius, Ed Skrein as Atticus Noble and Corey Stoll as Sindri in Rebel Moon — Part One A Child of Fire.

Alfonso Herrera as Cassius, Ed Skrein as Atticus Noble and Corey Stoll as Sindri in Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire. COURTESY OF NETFLIX

When we first meet Noble at the village on Veldt, the scene has shades of Inglourious Basterds’ introduction. He’s dressed like a tyrant, but he’s just polite enough to make you wonder if he’s halfway reasonable. Of course, he ends up proving what a menace he is, but was the idea to keep people guessing as long as possible?

I don’t want to say too much about the extended cut, but Zack has already mentioned that the opening of the extended cut is all me, so the village scene is going to be the second time you see Noble. And let’s just say that Noble may have already given the game away in the extended cut. You may already have a feeling of what’s going to happen [at the village], but that doesn’t mean that the tension of Noble tightening the guitar strings isn’t even more powerful.

I’m always trying to play things against type, and I read the script and the scenes to work out the emotional state of being. And then I always think, “What would be the obvious way to play this? How would every other actor play this?” And so my thing was just to flip it in the opposite direction. I wanted to soften the hard edges of Noble’s physicality and his costume, and the fact he’s got priests and spaceships and soldiers behind him is why I adopted this sing-songy, almost thespian voice. So I thought that would be intriguing and interesting and against type, and I actually based that voice on Olivia Colman.

Wow.

Yeah, I’ve been a big fan of her work since Peep Show, but what she did on The Crown was really interesting. So the voice is not exclusively based on her accent on The Crown, but it’s based on her. I thought that would really throw things off to almost hear her voice coming out of my mouth.

I can actually hear it now.

Yeah, when you watch the extended cut or if you watch the PG-13 cut again, you’ll be like, “Oh yeah, I can hear Olivia Colman in there.” I don’t how she’d feel about being a part of such a horrible tyrant, but it was out of respect.

Michiel Huisman as Gunnar, Ed Skrein as Atticus Noble and Greg Kriek as Marcus in Rebel Moon.

Michiel Huisman as Gunnar, Ed Skrein as Atticus Noble and Greg Kriek as Marcus in Rebel Moon. CLAY ENOS/NETFLIX

That village scene is mainly a conflict between your character, Corey Stoll’s character and Michiel Huisman’s character, and you and Michiel have a fascinating subplot that has nothing to do with Rebel Moon, as you both played Daario on Game of Thrones. So did you say, “Hi Daario,” to one another during your first encounter on set? Or was there a Western standoff at first?

(Laughs.) No, it was the complete opposite. It was, “Hi Michiel. Hi Ed. Nice to meet you. Can’t wait to work with you. Where do you live? Have you got children?” And we got on really well from the beginning, actually. It was really nice. So there were no awkward standoffs with him or anyone in the cast. Michiel is a good dude. He’s a really good dude, and I loved spending time with him on set. I also loved training with him in the gym and going on this press tour with him, so it’s been really nice. If I think of him as any character, it’s Gunnar from Rebel Moon.

It’s my job to make a fuss about two actors sharing the same role, but as you pointed out earlier, this is all part of an actor’s life. Sometimes, you replace an actor, and sometimes they replace you. So I can understand why it’s just another day at the office for you.

Yeah, I feel a kind of camaraderie and kinship with other actors, regardless of what roles they’ve taken or not taken. We understand the dynamics of our job and therefore can relate. And especially if we’re in the same cast, then it should be everyone’s preoccupation to just keep everything as positive and nice as possible. So that’s the way it goes. People will replace me in the future and I will replace other people in the future, and I’ll be a gentleman about it at all times. And I think Michiel will be, too.

You touched on this scene earlier, but Noble has a party with a space hookah and tentacles of some kind.

Scene 31!

Is there a medicinal aspect to the space hookah, or is he mostly just doping himself up? And where do you even begin with the tentacles?

I was thinking about that scene as it went on, and I suppose Zack could see that I was thinking about it. I kept coming up with these suggestions, like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I stood up and I had some weird alien vibrator or a ****ing sex toy for aliens?” And not something like a dildo, just something ambiguous. There’s a lot of ambiguity to that scene, and that’s what works about it. And in the extended cut, it’s obviously a lot more extended and slightly less ambiguous perhaps, but nonetheless, there are ambiguous things in it. So I thought that would be really cool, and Zack loved the idea and came up with a couple of his own ideas. The prop department then went off and did some stuff, and we had a good old giggle while we were shooting our other scenes and talking about what it could be.

Then we started talking about drugs, and the fact that this is the only time we see Noble switch off. This is the only time we see him in private, and I believe this is the only time we will see him [in private]. So it’s very telling, and we can see a tightly wound, high functioning individual. Often, when we see these workaholic tyrants, it’s easy for one to assume that they may be medicating in that way, and with the lack of balance that he shows, that’s a fair assumption.

So we’d already shot some scenes at the end where I have all these ports on my chest. They are eventually connected to the ceiling when they’re bringing Noble up to Balisarius and trying to revive him. Now, when I went back into the prosthetics truck, they had these little orange things instead of green screen. And when we would take them out, I’d be left with these weird crop circle lines on me. So I was like, “Take a picture of this. This is cool as ****. Let me show this to Zack.” So I went to him the next day and I said, “Listen, it would be really cool if we left those on without the ports.” And then the audience can wonder, “What is that? Are they tribal markings? Are they scars? Is he a cyborg?” but without ever answering the question. Zack then had the idea of a shisha pipe, which evolved into, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I smoked it through my body and it just went straight into my lungs?” So it’s just more of this notion that the Imperium and The King’s Gaze have advanced technology beyond what anyone on this planet and Veldt can dream of.

Ed Skrein as Atticus Noble in Rebel Moon.

Ed Skrein as Atticus Noble in Rebel Moon. JUSTIN LUBIN/NETFLIX

So Noble gets the rebels right where he wants them, but they slip through his grasp. Kora then fights Noble to the death, and after he visits Regent Balisarius, he is brought back to life through the aforementioned technology. Can anyone be resurrected in this fashion if they have access to this tech and these port modifications?

I think that’s a question for Mr. Snyder, and that’s not because of secrecy. I just don’t know the technical answer to that, but Zack has answers to everything. He’s thought about this, and he’ll at least have a very informed, logical response. Clearly, Noble’s rank in the Motherworld means that he’s given access to that, and the main reason that they’re reviving him is so that he can speak to Balisarius. It’s probably for efficiency that Balisarius will be the one to say, “OK, bring him back. Give him one more try. Let’s see how that goes.”

Yeah, he speaks with Fra Fee’s Regent Balisarius in some kind of astral plane or digital realm. What else can you say about the circumstances of that scene?

I think it’s an astral plane, and I wonder if it’s like me and you meeting up in the Metaverse. It’s like if we had our Oculus glasses on and we said, “All right, let’s meet up in the snooker hall.” So I think it’s the equivalent of that, but what’s so incredible about this world is that you’re stimulated. You have all these questions and you’re like, “What is that?” There were so many times on set where I’d find a hole in something and I’d go to Zack, who’d go, “Ah, right. This is what it is.” He was so enthusiastic and informed.

You recently worked with Shawn Levy on All the Light We Cannot See, and he is currently directing Deadpool 3 in your London backyard. Of course, you were the villain in the first Deadpool, so is Ajax going to somehow have a cup of coffee in Deadpool 3?

Wouldn’t that be fun? Unfortunately, I have to say no, not on this one. I loved working with Shawn. He’s such a sweet man, a gentleman, and I was really pleased for him when he told me on set. I was really, really excited for him, and we couldn’t stop talking about it and how wonderful and exciting it is. So, no, there are no plans for me to go back to that, but who knows what will happen in the future. I generally like to keep it moving and not look back, although a little Ajax cameo could be fun, even if I have to shave my head again.



‘Rebel Moon’ Co-Writer Kurt Johnstad Talks Part One’s R-Rated Cut and Nonstop Action of ‘Part Two’

After decades of collaborations, the veteran scribe is used to Zack Snyder's process, but 'Rebel Moon' was a new beast: "in a lot of ways, we were shooting four movies at once."

BY BRIAN DAVIDS
DECEMBER 28, 2023 1:09PM



Kurt Johnstad and Rebel Moon Still

Kurt Johnstad and Rebel Moon Still KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES; CLAY ENOS/NETFLIX

[This story contains spoilers for Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire.]

Rebel Moon co-writers Kurt Johnstad and Zack Snyder go way back. Years and years before they struck gold with 300 (2006), Johnstad first met Snyder at a time when they were both cutting their teeth in the world of music videos, and in 1997, Snyder raised the idea of Rebel Moon in its embryonic form of Seven Samurai in space. And once they both broke into the film industry in the early 2000s, Johnstad and Snyder began to brainstorm potential characters and scenes.

Johnstad and Snyder’s partnership then led to the 300 franchise and various other unproduced scripts. In 2012, Snyder pitched the idea as a more grown-up version of Star Wars to Lucasfilm, but when Disney acquired the company, Snyder knew that his vision wouldn’t see the light of day. He then entertained the idea of a TV series with producer Eric Newman, but it wasn’t until Snyder’s dramatic exit from Warner Bros. and its DC Extended Universe that Johnstad would eventually get a call about their long-gestating idea that they referred to as The Five.

“During Covid, in March of 2020, [Snyder] called me. We had just finished working together on another project called Blood and Ashes, and he said, ‘Hey, I think we can revisit The Five,’” Johnstad tells The Hollywood Reporter. “He was just starting to do Army of the Dead with Netflix, and he was like, ‘I think I’m going to need another movie to do with them after this, so let’s talk about it.’”

Johnstad and Snyder then wrote nearly 100 pages of the story, and when a deadline came near, Snyder’s Army of the Dead co-writer Shay Hatten jumped on board, bringing the page total to 216, give or take. Knowing full well that a 216-page was unlikely to be produced as one movie, the Rebel Moon creative team whittled their script down to around 138 pages, but Snyder ultimately made the call to return to the longer script. This decision then got the ball rolling on the now two-part film series, as well as a shorter PG-13 cut and an extended R-rated cut for each part. The latter decision is proving to be controversial among fans and critics, as Snyder’s best work tends to happen when he’s unrestrained.

However, Johnstad understands why Netflix would want to include younger teenagers in the proceeding, without parental controls and age restrictions getting in the way of their latest crack at a big-budget streaming franchise. “At some point, there was a business decision of, ‘How can we have more eyes? How can we have more people experience this?’” Johnstad says. “And that’s just part of Hollywood. People make these decisions all the time.”

With Part One now released and topping Netflix’s film chart, Johnstad is also shedding light on what viewers can expect from Part One’s extended R-rated cut that will be released at an unknown later date. Snyder, during a recent appearance on The Film Junkee’s YouTube stream, confirmed that Part One’s extended director’s cut won’t drop before Part Two in April.

“There’s definitely a lot more story at the front of the movie. You’re definitely going to get a lot more [of Anthony Hopkins’] Jimmy and see his arc, and you’re going to get a lot more of Kora and the Motherworld,” Johnstad shares. “You’re going to get a different introduction to Noble. You’re also going to get a different introduction to some smaller characters like Aris [Sky Yang], who’s the Motherworld soldier that defends the character of Sam in the granary. But just in broad brushstrokes, there’s more character, and certainly knowing Zack, there’s more action and spectacle and the visual vibrance of what he does. So there just wasn’t enough time. It would’ve been a four-hour PG-13 movie.”

Johnstad also says that Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver feels like its own distinct movie compared to Part One.

“I would say that it’s definitely its own movie, and it’s a very different movie. It’s not an assembly of the team. The team is built, and now it’s why they fight,” Johnstad says. “I think [the PG-13 cut] is two hours, or maybe it’s more, but it’s a nonstop action rollercoaster ride of twists and turns. And the ending is spectacular.”

Below, during a recent spoiler conversation with THR, Johnstad also discusses his writing process with Snyder, before offering some clarity on Admiral Noble’s resurrection and his first-class trip to the Motherworld’s astral plane.

So I’m all-in on what you guys are doing, but having to wait for the full six-hour experience is proving to be a problem for me.

(Laughs.) Six!? You’re shortchanging us. We’re ambitious.

Oh, so there’s even more than expected. Anyway, for those who don’t know, what’s the CliffsNotes version of your origin story with Zack?

We have a three-decade friendship. We started working together 30 years ago, and he first mentioned this [Rebel Moon] idea to me in 1997. We’ve always had a love for all things movies, and then, around 2003, when we actually started making movies and working in the business, he said, “Hey, maybe one day we’ll get to make Seven Samurai in outer space.” And I was like, “Oh, that’d be awesome.” So, in ‘03, we started doing character sketches and some scene work: “Wouldn’t this be cool? Could there be a heist? Could there be a double cross? What would it look like?”

And then both of our careers took their own trajectories, and we worked together many times on projects and then other times separately. There were times where he took shots with Lucasfilm and Disney, but that didn’t pan out. He then tried to turn it into a TV show with Eric Newman until he said, “I think this is a movie.”

And then, during Covid, in March of 2020, he called me. We had just finished working together on another project called Blood and Ashes, and he said, “Hey, I think we can revisit The Five.” That’s what we were calling it at the time, and he was like, “I think we should look at that. Maybe there’s an opportunity to do it.” He was just starting to do Army of the Dead with Netflix, and he was like, “I think I’m going to need another movie to do with them after this, so let’s talk about it.” So we did, and then we just started figuring out the story.


(L-R) screenwriter/producer Kurt Johnstad and director/writer/producer Zack Snyder on the set of Rebel Moon — Part One A Child of Fire.

(L-R) screenwriter/producer Kurt Johnstad and director/writer/producer Zack Snyder on the set of Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire. CLAY ENOS/NETFLIX

After co-writing two 300 movies and various unproduced scripts together, what made Rebel Moon the right situation for another reunion, as opposed to all the superhero movies he made?

We’ve always been very close as friends, and we had just been talking about this for years. It’s a funny business that we’re in where creative alchemy turns these leaden ideas into gold. So I have always trusted Zack’s instincts, and I think he has the same feeling when it comes to me. So we just knew that a lot of work and a lot of effort was going to be put into this, and the reward is up there on the screen.

For some reason, I have this mental picture of Zack pacing back and forth with his ax in hand, spitballing these huge ideas in his spirited, energetic way, while you and Shay Hatten somehow turn them into pages. Is there any truth to that image of your writing process?

(Laughs.) Yes, sometimes, it’s an ax, but many times, he’ll be holding a Leica camera. And sometimes, it’s a football. We’ll throw a football back and forth. Zack is a kinetic human being. He is always in movement, in his mind, his heart and his body. That’s just kind of who he is and how I’ve always known him to be.

How [the writing process] has worked in the past is Zack will always write the first five or ten pages of every script that I’ve worked with him on, and then he’ll usually write the last five pages. And so that creates this creative container or bookends for the story. They’re guardrails for the 200-plus pages in this case. And when I read his first pages, I am always like, “Damnit, he’s literally just poured gasoline on this thing, and I’m playing catch up already.” That’s happened in every script that I’ve worked with him on, from 300 to scripts that haven’t even been filmed yet. We have things on the shelf that maybe will be made one day, but it’s always a really fun process.

And then it’s looking at the workflow and beating out which things need to be done and saying, “Okay, I’ll take these two scenes and you take those two scenes.” And then there’s this really lovely creative competition that happens where he’ll read me a scene late at night and say, “Hey, this is how I’m punching out of this scene.” And I’ll be like, “Okay, great. Got it. Here’s how I’m going to enter that scene.” So I’m not going to question [our process]. I don’t want to intellectualize it or even try to figure it out, but it’s worked for 20 years. So I’m going to keep going with it.

So you, Zack and Shay combined to write a 216-page script, and then the decision was made to split those 216 pages in half for two movies. From there, how much refinement did you have to do each half so that both functioned as their own movies?

Before Rebel Moon became two movies, we brought Shay in around 95 or 100 pages. The script was somewhere in there, and we weren’t going to hit the deadline that we’d set for ourselves. Zack had other commitments. He was doing his cut of Justice League, and there are only so many hours in a day. So he was like, “Do you mind if I bring Shay on?” And I was like, “Absolutely not, if you trust him.” So we brought him on, and Shay, who’s been an amazing partner, hit the ground running. By the end of all three of us working on it, it went from those 95 or 100 pages that Zack and I had to 200-plus pages. We knew we couldn’t deliver a 200-plus page script, so there are many drafts where we cut it down. The leanest it got was 136 or 138.

And Zack, in his wisdom, was just like, “We’re losing all the mythology. We’re losing the characters. We can’t do this.” So then we went back to the big draft and just asked ourselves, “What is the best story?” And then we started looking for a place where we could break it up, and we found that place just by consensus. We were like, “It’s right in here, if we create another ending and do a few things on either side of it to shore up why we would create a cliffhanger there.” So that is basically how we broke both movies, and their shooting drafts both ran just under a hundred pages each.


Michiel Huisman as Gunnar, Ed Skrein as Atticus Noble and Greg Kriek as Marcus in Rebel Moon.

(L-R) Michiel Huisman as Gunnar, Ed Skrein as Atticus Noble and Greg Kriek as Marcus in Rebel Moon. CLAY ENOS/NETFLIX

Now, I understand why Netflix would want shorter PG-13 cuts in order to maximize views among younger teenagers and not run into parental controls and age restrictions. PG-13 also creates more merchandising opportunities, but we’ve learned by now that Zack is at his best when his work is unadulterated. So how much deliberation was there about doing both PG-13 and R-rated cuts? Was Zack conflicted at all from what you could tell?

I wasn’t in those meetings, so I can’t really speak with confidence of how those decisions were made. The long draft that became two movies was always the Zack Snyder draft, and I would call that the extended version draft. So we ended up filming all of that. It’s not like he went back and did reshoots to do an extended version. That didn’t happen. Everything that was in the [153] days of shooting was in the extended version [of the script], and at some point, there was a business decision of, “How can we have more eyes? How can we have more people experience this?” And that’s just part of Hollywood. People make these decisions all the time.

So we really had our eyes on four drafts, because, in a lot of ways, we were shooting four movies at once. It’s not just two movies. There are line reads and dialogue and little inferences [to track], and the nuances of how hard an action scene can go [for PG-13 versus R]. So everybody kept a multitude of plates in the air, but nobody had as many as Zack. I still don’t know how he does it, but it’s impressive to watch.


Doona Bae as Nemesis, Ray Fisher as Bloodaxe, Staz Nair as Tarak, Michiel Huisman as Gunnar, Sofia Boutella as Kora, Charlie Hunnam as Kai, E. Duffy as Milius and Djimon Hounsou as Titus in Rebel Moon.

Doona Bae as Nemesis, Ray Fisher as Bloodaxe, Staz Nair as Tarak, Michiel Huisman as Gunnar, Sofia Boutella as Kora, Charlie Hunnam as Kai, E. Duffy as Milius and Djimon Hounsou as Titus in Rebel Moon. COURTESY OF CLAY ENOS/NETFLIX

The movie devotes most of its runtime to assembling a team, but as soon as that team is assembled, it’s immediately disassembled, resulting in a new version of the team that’s six people at the moment. What was the thought process behind that swerve?

We knew we needed a cliffhanger to create an energy and an appetite for more. We also knew that we were filming both films back to back, and so people weren’t going to have to wait three years like they did between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. They’re not going to lose their minds or lose interest because the window is only four months. In April, they’re going to get the answers to movie one. So we knew we needed something to change the attitude of the characters and also change the attitude and the experience of the audience in a big way. There are a couple things that happen at the end of movie one that definitely get you to sit up in your seat and go, “Wait a second, what just happened?” And that launches this next band of outsiders or rebels, and it sends them onto movie two.

Kora (Sofia Boutella) kills Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein) in the end, but he’s resurrected through this technology on The King’s Gaze. Can anyone be brought back in this fashion if they have access to that tech? Or do Noble’s specific modifications allow him to have this ability?

If we fall in love with somebody and then we kill them, the rules of the world don’t allow us to just bring them back, but some people have accessibility to technology and are constructed in a way to where they can be brought back. And not everybody can jump into the astral plane where Noble goes and talks to Balisarius. That’s very much a Motherworld-centric thing, and it’s also where Noble is in the caste system. He is a privileged admiral of a military dreadnought. It’s not like he’s a person who’s selling at the farmer’s market in the Motherworld. The people on the street don’t have neural links, and so they don’t have that capability.

Is Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee) linked up to the astral plane somewhere else on The King’s Gaze?

I can’t really go into the mechanics, but you will see more of the astral plane being used. It’s how people can communicate information through space and in a subconscious way. It’s almost like a scientific dream state, I would say. I don’t know if that’s approved by Zack, but that’s how I always looked at it. If they’re plugged in, then they can talk to somebody a light-year away if it’s that far.

What can you tease about Part One’s extended cut? Is there more backstory for characters like the Bloodaxes (Ray Fisher, Cleopatra Coleman), Jimmy (Anthony Hopkins) and Tarak (Staz Nair)?

There’s definitely a lot more story at the front of the movie. You’re definitely going to get a lot more Jimmy and see his arc, and you’re going to get a lot more of Kora and the Motherworld. You’re going to get a different introduction to Noble. You’re also going to get a different introduction to some smaller characters like Aris [Sky Yang], who’s the Motherworld soldier that defends the character of Sam in the granary. So you get an interesting look into why he is now constricted as a slave soldier of the Motherworld and how he got there. So his arc is much more defined. But just in broad brushstrokes, there’s more character, and certainly knowing Zack, there’s more action and spectacle and the visual vibrance of what he does. There’s definitely a lot more mythology, and a deeper understanding of the Motherworld and their intention, and what the rebellion is coming up against. So there just wasn’t enough time. It would’ve been a four-hour PG-13 movie.


Jimmy Performed by Dustin Ceithamer/Voiced by Anthony Hopkins and Charlotte Maggi as Sam in Rebel Moon.

(L-R) Jimmy (Performed by Dustin Ceithamer/Voiced by Anthony Hopkins) and Charlotte Maggi as Sam in Rebel Moon. COURTESY OF NETFLIX

Jimmy’s scene with Sam (Charlotte Maggi) is probably my favorite scene, so I’m glad to hear there’s going to be more of him.

Yeah, it is such a beautiful scene. Zack wrote that scene. It’s a stunning piece of work, especially how he shot it. Charlotte [Maggi], the actress who plays Sam, is just so perfect and innocent in that scene, and her work is fantastic.

And how does Part Two compare to Part One? Does it feel like its own movie with a different engine and tone?

I would say that it’s definitely its own movie, and it’s a very different movie. It’s not an assembly of the team. The team is built, and now it’s why they fight. I think [the PG-13 cut] is two hours, or maybe it’s more, but it’s a nonstop action rollercoaster ride of twists and turns. And the ending is spectacular. We hope things are going to turn out the way they do, but it’s a fantastic, fun ride that’s very different than [Part One].

Charlize Theron told me a few years ago that Atomic Blonde 2, or Atomic Blonder as I prefer to call it, was in some stage of development at Netflix. Do you still have ties to that property?

I don’t! I think they’re supposed to come and talk to me at some point. But [Atomic Blonde] was a fun one to write. I’m very proud of that movie and what Dave [Leitch] and Charlize and Sofia [Boutella] did with it. So it was great to reconnect with [Sofia] on Rebel Moon, because she was so fantastic in [Atomic Blonde]. But no, I don’t know what’s going on with it. More often than not, people come up to me and ask me that question: “Where’s Atomic Blonde 2? What are we waiting for?” And I am like, “These decisions aren’t made by me.” But I know that [Charlize] had fun doing it. It was a hard shoot, but every shoot is hard. So I’d love to see [a sequel].

Can you say what you’re writing right now?

I can tell you that I’m working with Zack Snyder on a bunch of really big ideas. A lot of them.

Rebel Moon Part Three?

Zack and I are always going to bet on ourselves because it’s not gambling if you bet on yourself. So, in success, we hope to continue giving the fans what they deserve, which is some cool new original stories. Zack is excited to bring those stories to them.
 

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021

Variety: Netflix Sued Over Canceled Game Deal for Zack Snyder’s ‘Rebel Moon’ Movies






Lawsuit can be found here: https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Evil-Genius-v-Netflix.pdf

Edit: As of the claims within the lawsuit and mentioned in the Variety article, some things remain to be confirmed.

Per the suit, "In addition to Rebel Moon themed sequels, television shows, graphic novels, and other potential content and merchandise, Mr. Snyder expressly requested that there be a Rebel Moon based TTRPG. To Mr. Snyder, a TTRPG was critical to the development of the entire Rebel Moon universe since it would provide content for future Rebel Moon derivatives."

"As soon as Plaintiff caught wind that Netflix was looking to release a Rebel Moon based TTRPG, it started working on a pitch, given its prominence in the TTRPG industry. This included creating mock cover art and character illustrations for the game, developing some potential story lines, and even producing a miniature TTRPG that Netflix executive could play at the pitch. Netflix and Mr. Snyder were blown away. The parties met multiple times thereafter to discuss the project in detail and negotiate the terms of their partnership. Eventually, Plaintiff and Netflix executed a written Overall Merchandising License Agreement (the “Agreement”) on March 22, 2023, which was made effective as of February 1, 2023."


True? Potentially.

In the March 19th, 2023 podcast with The Nerd Queens (video is timestamped), Snyder said, “The one thing that I’m having a really good time with – and I don’t really know if I’m supposed to talk about it – is this RPG that we’re doing that is just literally insane, and so immersive and so intense and so huge, [...] There’s more coming, but all I’ll say is that it was pitched to me – because I’ve always wanted to do an RPG – like, ‘well, we could do it at this scale, or we could do it at ridiculous scale. And I was like, 'ridiculous scale is clearly the scale that we should be doing it.'

The same is attested within the lawsuit, quote included, timestamped video included.

Snyder's "It was pitched to me – because I’ve always wanted to do an RPG" corroborates EG's "[Plaintiff] started working on a pitch", and his speaking of it on March 19th fits in with the execution of the Agreement taking place on March 22nd. Though Zack didn't explicitly name the developer and sources like Polygon confirmed it was an "as of yet unnamed developer", it was still confirmed to be an RPG of massive scale. A video-game RPG would be not very feasible to produce so timely, but a "228-page World Bible [...] a 430-page “Player’s Guide” and 337-page “Game Master’s Guide”" totaling 990-1000 pages of content is of great scale.

The artwork for the Gamemasters Guide and Player Handbook was made public in May via the SnyderNetflix account, and reports of the TTRPG being cancelled entirely was rumored in July from the same account. Per the lawsuit and Variety, the cancellation was made known to the plaintiff on May 25th.

However, the lawsuit makes clear that the GAMA event was held from April 24-27th, and the panel for the Rebel Moon TTRPG was held that Wednesday the 26th. The presentation was led by Dave Scott, the Evil Genius Games' CEO, and Joe Lawson, the head of Publishing at Netflix. The GAMA EXPO site book was published March 29th, 2023, so this was well-planned ahead of time and attendees were notified of who would be present a month+ before the event. See here:

Screenshots_2023-09-28-16-13-32.png


Source: https://issuu.com/fahy-williamspublishing/docs/23_gama_site_book_digimag, page 82.

There was an NDA in place for footage of the movie itself.

The phrase “lauding the work of Evil Genius’ team of creators,” presented by Variety as if a direct claim within the suit made by Evil Genius Games, appears nowhere inside the lawsuit. The closest claim approximating the phrase is "Mr. Snyder (and multiple Netflix executives) routinely praised the company’s work".

Is it a breach of contract and of confidentiality on the part of Evil Genius?

IMO, unlikely. The notion that Netflix would execute a merchandising agreement with Evil Genius on March 22nd, and that their head of Publishing agreed to have his name attached to an event confirmed and publicized on March 29th, then be present at the event a month later on April 26th, only for Netflix to do a 180 on the revelation of information at that same event and terminate the contract on May 25th shows a series of rather ridiculous actions by Netflix supposing that Evil Genius surprised them with the panel at the event they knew about and with artwork they approved. But Netflix has enough money for this to not matter, so Evil Genius Games will need a good paper trail and video evidence to make this clear on their side.

There is now an update on the case between Evil Genius Games and Netflix.

Per Evil Genius Games on their official site,

The following is a joint statement prepared by us and Netflix relating to the recently resolved litigation between us.

“The parties are pleased that they were able to amicably resolve this dispute. Netflix thanks Evil Genius for their hard work and professionalism.”

We will not be releasing a Rebel Moon game, but stay tuned for more amazing Cinematic Adventures and upcoming new projects.

That the Rebel Moon TTRPG won't be released leaves me curious as to what exactly they agreed on that was so amicable. Evil Genius wanted their name properly attached to the work they did when Netflix accused them of breach of contract/confidentiality and took ownership of that labor over acknowledging the partnership.

I suppose the "amicable" portion would have to be that by Netflix not publishing the TTRPG themselves, they also aren't claiming sole ownership of it as alleged by Evil Genius Games, and also not promoting any notion that Evil Genius Games committed wrongdoing/breached the contract.
 
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