Warning! SPOILERS for Army of Thieves
Army of Thieves is the second installment of Zack Snyder's Netflix zombie franchise, and the movie includes one key scene directed by Snyder. Army of Thieves focuses on Matthias Schweighöfer's safe-cracking comic relief character from Army of the Dead, Ludwig Dieter, with Schweighöfer also co-producing and directing the prequel. Despite being part of the same franchise, Army of Thieves goes in a very different, much more zombie-light direction than its predecessor did.
In Army of Thieves, Dieter (whose real name is revealed as Sebastian Schlencht-Wöhnert) is working as a bank-teller in his native Germany, when he's recruited for a daring bank heist plot by seasoned thief Gwendoline Starr (Nathalie Emmanuel). The two develop a romance over the course of their three big heists, though it's sadly cut short when Gwendoline allows herself to be arrested to give Sebastian a chance to escape. Army of Thieves also takes place during the early stages of the zombie outbreak in Army of the Dead, with its ending being what really ties the two movies together.
In the final scene, Sebastian now lives in the U.S., running a locksmith shop and having adopted the Ludwig Dieter alias, at Gwendoline's earlier suggestion, coined after a comic book hero he dreams up. Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) and Maria Cruz (An de la Reguera) arrive to recruit Dieter for what would become the Las Vegas heist in Army of the Dead. The scene itself was mostly seen in Army of the Dead, though it includes a bit of additional lead-in and dialogue, and was clearly pulled from Snyder's movie to tie his Army of the Dead and Army of Thieves together.
The scene's inclusion in Army of Thieves also gives more context for Dieter's enthusiasm to join the heist in Army of the Dead. With Gwendoline's heist being less about money (though they certainly grab plenty) and more about the challenge of it, Dieter joined in large part because of the test of cracking a legendary vault designed by Hans Wagner, known as the Götterdämmerung. With Dieter successfully cracking this very safe model in Army of Thieves, owned by Army of the Dead's Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) no less, he knows there's no one better equipped to be the safecracker on the planned heist. Despite playing coy about his own capability, he agrees to join the crew.
Army of Thieves is very much the night to Army of the Dead's day in both tone and approach to the heist sub-genre. Dieter certainly provides plenty of comic relief in Army of the Dead, while Army of Thieves is much more of an outright rom-com, with the zombies being largely kept to the periphery or in Dieter's occasional prophetic nightmares about them. Nonetheless, the inclusion of Dieter's recruitment scene is the strongest link between the two very different films in Snyder's Army of the Dead universe. Though Dieter appeared to meet his end at the hands of Zeus in Army of the Dead, with aliens and time loops in play for the forthcoming sequel Planet of the Dead, per Snyder himself, Army of Thieves might not be the last viewers have seen of Ludwig Dieter, or Gwendoline, for that matter.