Anticipated Netflix original movie gets scrapped before it starts

Zack Snyder will not get a chance to make any more Army of the Dead movies for Netflix, despite having big plans for the franchise.

This news comes from an interview with Zack and producing partner (and wife) Deborah Snyder, who told TheWrap the projects have been “quietly” cancelled.

Snyder wanted to make both an animated series and a follow-up film to 2021’s Army of the Dead.

It’s another casualty of the new era of Netflix’s production strategy. The streamer’s movie output is now headed up by Dan Lin, who wants to make content more cheaply and, of course, better.

Early reports suggested the amount of created content will drop significantly too, but this has been denied by Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos.

The timing of this cancellation can only make you wonder whether the tepid performance of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon movies was the last straw for Netflix.

Rebel Moon peaked at 77 million hours viewed in a week, dropping to 44.2 million for the second part of the film, released in April 2024. They're solid but not mind-blowing numbers, and the Part Two drop was significant.

The Rebel Moon concept is about big Star Wars-grade world-building on a sensible budget. But it clearly hasn't captured the public’s imagination as hoped, and with a combined production budget of $166 million, may not now be deemed a stellar use of cash.

Damsel, which handily beat both parts of Rebel Moon this year with a 93.2 million hour weekly peak, had a lower $60 million production budget and snuck into the all-time English language top 10.

Netflix hasn’t put the brakes on the Snyders entirely, though.

Zack Snyder loves a director's cut, and the extended “R-rated” editions of the Rebel Moon films were released on August 2. You could be forgiven for missing them, though, as they were not released with much fanfare.

Rebel Moon — Part One: Director’s Cut, dubbed Chalice of Blood, clocks in at 3 hours 24 minutes. It has only just scraped into most Netflix top 10 movie charts, according to Flixpatrol.

Part Two’s extended edition, the 2 hour 53 minute Curse of Forgiveness, barely managed that.

The fervour for the director’s cut of Snyder’s 2017 movie Justice League went viral. This clearly hasn’t happened with Rebel Moon.

It casts some doubt on whether Rebel Moon Part 3 will even happen, especially when it’s intended to be a larger-scale action project.

“It scales pretty crazily. You can imagine: this third act of this movie is a pretty big battle,” Snyder told Yahoo UK.

But, sure, if you’ve been hankering after the roughly 6.5-hour cut of Rebel Moon, it’s right up there on Netflix.

• Best Netflix Original series and movies