Before Zack Snyder turned his attention to superheroes, he made himself known with a remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Remaking a horror classic will always be a tough challenge, but Snyder managed to put his own stamp on the story and delivered what is still considered to be one of the best horror remakes of all-time. It's been 17 years since Snyder last unleashed his brand of zombie mayhem, but the director has returned to the genre with Army of the Dead, and Entertainment Weekly has released a pair of new photos from the Netflix film.
Army of the Dead is "set amid a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, during which a man assembles a group of mercenaries to take the ultimate gamble, venturing into the quarantined zone to pull off the greatest heist ever attempted." That's all I need to know. Zack Snyder added that the film is "a full-blown, balls-to-the-wall zombie heist movie, so it's genre-on-genre in a great way. So you expect pure zombie mayhem, and you get that, 100 percent. But also you get these really amazing characters on a fantastic journey. It's going to surprise people that there's a lot of warmth and real emotion with these great characters." As Snyder mentioned, although the film is certainly a zombie movie, it will be playing with more genres than Dawn of the Dead.
With Dawn, we made a zombie movie but tried to do it all the way with all of those tropes of the genre. That was so fun, so I started to think of what were other genres that story didn't have room for. It's this tone where you have fun with the genre but you don't make fun of the genre — it's a fine line.
Netflix was so pumped about Army of the Dead that they also got the ball rolling on a prequel film (that recently wrapped) as well as an anime series. These projects will explore the how and the why of the zombie outbreak. "I've done a very deep dive with the why of the zombie plague and where it starts," Snyder said. "Sufficed to say, that it does come from Area 51 — that's in the film's opening scene – and then the whole cast is in the animated series, along with Christian Slater as the bad guy. We really do a super deep dive on where this like zombie plague came from." Army of the Dead will debut on Netflix later this summer.
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