It turns out Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is in a shared universe with Army of the Dead. During an interview with Total Film, the filmmaker revealed the unexpected connection between the two, very different movies.
“Army of the Dead has a pretty vast mythology that never made it into the movie,” he explained. “There’s actually a character from Rebel Moon in the Army of the Dead animated series that we never did.”
The unproduced Army of the Dead TV series was originally greenlit by Netflix back in 2020 and would have served as a prequel to Snyder’s Zombie flick. Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas was supposed to hit the streaming service following the release of the original film and its spin-off, Army of Thieves. Unfortunately, the series was never made, so the crossover never happened. However, it would have seen characters head to another dimension entirely.
“At one point in the show, they go through a portal into another dimension, and there are characters in that other dimension that they come across,” Snyder explained. “In Rebel Moon, they’re in this bar, and one of the aliens is one of the characters from the animatic. So, it’s definitely a shared universe.”
Rebel Moon is more of a sci-fi space adventure, but that doesn’t mean Army of the Dead doesn’t have certain sci-fi elements to it. After all, some of the zombies were in fact... err... robots?
“Without giving away too much... If you pay close attention, there's a number of zombies that are clearly not zombies,” he said during a Q&A in 2021. “You see normal zombies and then you see some robot zombies. Are they monitors that the government has placed among the zombies to monitor them? Are they technology from the other world? What's happening there?”
IGN’s Army of the Dead review gave it 6/10 and said: “Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead may look cool on the surface, and it lures you in with potentially game-changing twists to zombie lore, but it quickly devolves into just another undead shoot 'em up with disposable, forgettable characters. While it does some fascinating things with the zombie genre that we haven't seen since George A. Romero, Army of the Dead ends up bogged down by its own self-importance and forgets how fun it's supposed to be. Its promising opening credits sequence is so much better than the rest of the film.”
Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire debuts on Netflix on December 22, 2023.
Want to read more about Rebel Moon? Check out Snyder talking about the plot of Rebel Moon as well as how Rebel Moon could be the start of a new cinematic universe.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
