Zack Snyder says his zombie action movie, Army of the Dead, will release in Winter 2020, and has revealed some additional plot details for the film. Having spent a significant chunk of the past ten years playing in the Worlds of DC, the filmmaker is returning to the genre where he made his name in the first place. Indeed, those with long memories might recall Sndyer made his feature-length directing debut on 2004's Dawn of the Dead, a remake of George A. Romeo's horror classic that traded in the movie's traditional lumbering zombies for fast-moving monsters instead.
Titled Army of the Dead, Snyder's new project has set up shop at Netflix, after a previous version of the film (which Snyder was set to produce only) failed to take off at Warner Bros. in the late 2000s. Production officially kicked off back in the summer, with Snyder directing a cast led by Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Theo Rossi, Hiroyuki Sanada, Chelsea Edmundson, and Raúl Castillo, among many others. More recently, the Army of the Dead shoot made its way over to Atlantic City, giving Snyder the opportunity to call in and chat with a local radio station about the movie.
Speaking on 93.3 WMMR's Preston & Steve Fun Size Podcast, Snyder revealed that Army of the Dead starts off with Las Vegas being hit by a zombie plague that's contained with a wall of shipping containers built around the city, causing it to fall as its citizens are evacuated. Six years later, however, one of the still-living Vegas casino owners recruits a team of "zombie soldiers" (led by Bautista's character) to enter the quarantined city and retrieve his money from a safe in his old casino. Snyder also confirmed that Netflix is currently planning to release Army of the Dead in Winter 2020 (with a firm date TBA).
These plot details align with previous reports about Army of the Dead, which have described the screenplay by Snyder, Joby Harold (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword), and Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum) as being a zombie heist adventure. It sounds like a goofy, but fun and otherwise inventive genre mashup that lies firmly in Snyder's wheelhouse as a storyteller (and all the more so with the cast he has at his disposal). By comparison, the old Army of the Dead script included elements like zombies raping human women, and was unnecessarily exploitative and wannabe edgy for its own sake. And again, it didn't have Snyder directing, which is all the more reason to be thankful that it never actually came to pass.
As for the Winter 2020 release, that too makes sense. For two years running, Netflix has released a new tentpole in December that earned big viewership numbers as people checked them out over the winter holiday frame (starting with Bright in 2017 and continuing on with Bird Box in 2018). They've since scheduled Michael Bay's action-thriller 6 Underground to begin streaming mid-December in the hopes of keeping this successful approach going, and may well be planning to do the same with Army of the Dead next year. Either way, everyone has a rough idea now of when, exactly, Snyder's latest zombie thrill ride will be hitting the scene.
Army of the Dead does not have an official release date yet.
Source: Preston & Steve Fun Size Podcast