Long before he began guiding the DCEU, Zack Snyder remade the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead, managing to accidentally foreshadow his future. Snyder directed several films before getting involved with DC, and will no doubt direct many more going forward, most recently scoring a hit with Netflix's Army of the Dead. It feels right that Snyder's first post-DC directorial effort was a zombie film, as Dawn of the Dead was his feature debut back in 2004.
While horror remakes tend to be dismissed off-hand by fans, there are rare ones that manage to truly impress, and Snyder's Dawn of the Dead is one of them. It's not the groundbreaking masterpiece that George A. Romero made back in 1978, but it's quite good taken on its own terms. Instead of simply trying to copy or overwrite Romero's work, Snyder and writer James Gunn smartly chose the same basic premise of a zombie apocalypse with survivors holing up in a mall and used it as a jumping-off point for a new story with new characters.
While Romero never cared for the running zombies Snyder used, even he couldn't hate the remake fully, as its smash success directly contributed to Universal offering to produce Romero's sequel Land of the Dead in 2005. In 2013, nine years after his Dawn of the Dead remake released, Snyder would of course helm Superman's big-screen return in Man of Steel. In a roundabout way though, Snyder's Dawn actually provided a glimpse into his own future.
One of the defining features of a shopping mall - at least the relatively small amount that still dot the U.S. nowadays - is the presence of dozens of stores under a single roof. The idea behind a mall is to offer just about any type of product a consumer could want, from furniture to food and drink, to clothes, and beyond, which is of course what makes it such a logical place to try and ride out a zombie outbreak. One of the biggest stores to be found in Dawn of the Dead 2004's mall just happens to be called Metropolis. This in itself effectively serves as a call forward to Snyder's 2013 film Man of Steel, as Henry Cavill's adult Superman lives in Metropolis. There's actually a bit more to the accidental foreshadowing though.
Metropolis gets messed up, leading the group of security guards among the survivors to say lines like "And you already trashed Metropolis" and "You can start by cleaning up that mess you made in Metropolis." One of the more notable knocks against Man of Steel from some is just how destructive the battles between Superman and the Kryptonian villains are to Metropolis, with wanton chaos happening all around. That was even turned into a plot point in Batman V Superman, toward why Bruce Wayne saw Superman as a danger. Adding to the odd parallels is that Michael Kelly, who played the lead guard in Dawn of the Dead, was cast again by Snyder in Man of Steel, as a reporter for The Daily Planet who ended up right in the middle of the carnage. While it obviously wasn't the genesis of the Snyder-Verse, it may illustrate that Snyder always subconsciously had Superman on the brain.