Army of the Dead is an upcoming American zombie heist film directed by Zack Snyder, that will premiere on the Netflix streaming service sometime during 2021. Unfortunately no trailers have been released as yet but Snyder has released a few images to whet your appetite.
The Army of the Dead movie stars Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Ana de la Reguera, Garret Dillahunt, Raul Castillo, Omari Hardwick, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tig Notaro and Matthias Schweighöfer. The accompanying anime will be titled Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas and will center around some of the characters from Army of the Dead during the early phases of the zombie outbreak.
“It is a full-blown, balls-to-the-wall zombie heist movie, so it’s genre-on-genre in a great way,” says Snyder (Man of Steel, 300) in an exclusive first look behind the scenes of the film coming later this year. “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.”
Snyder got the idea for his monster genre mash-up shortly after finishing his acclaimed 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead. The new film’s setup is that a plague has been released from Nevada’s secretive Area 51 military base. The U.S. government has managed to contain the outbreak by building a wall around an overrun Sin City. But there’s still all that cash in zombie-infested casinos, if only somebody is brave (or dumb) enough to try to go and get it.
Netflix was so enthusiastic about the idea, the streamer also funded a four-hour animated prequel series. The prequel will dive into the plague’s origin story, which is another genre departure for the project as most zombie movies and TV shows tend to either keep the origin of the outbreak frustratingly vague. “I’ve done a very deep dive with the why of the zombie plague and where it starts,” Snyder says. “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.”
For his lead hero, Snyder reached out to Dave Bautista, who quickly said the opposite of yes. “I said I wasn’t interested,” Bautista recalls. “I had this chip on my shoulder and was looking for juicy [dramatic roles]. Then I read the script and it was a lot deeper and had more layers than I thought. And also, to be quite frank, I wanted to work with Zack.” Bautista became such a convert, he says he gave up a part in Guardians director James Gunn’s upcoming The Suicide Squad to keep the role. “
Source : Tech Radar