Zack Snyder says a hypothetical Rick and Morty movie is the only comedy he'd direct. Snyder is definitely having a moment in early 2021, thanks to HBO Max’s unveiling of the Justice League Snyder Cut as well as Netflix’s release of the director’s zombie-heist mash-up movie Army of the Dead.
Snyder being the hottest name in entertainment (at least for a minute) is definitely a reversal of fortunes for the director who in 2017 was forced to leave Justice League under tragic circumstances while Joss Whedon famously finished the epic DCEU superhero team-up film. Of course, the results of Whedon taking over Justice League proved disastrous, prompting DC and Snyder fans’ cries to release the Snyder Cut. Those dreams indeed came true this year when the Snyder Cut, a superior version of Justice League in the eyes of many, at last arrived. Now, Snyder is again front-and-center thanks to Army of the Dead, a movie that is being hailed as the director’s most purely entertaining film to date.
Though Army of the Dead is definitely more of a B-movie trip than something like the Snyder Cut, or most of the director’s other previous works, the film is still not what most people would call light-hearted. Indeed Snyder himself is not someone most people would immediately associate with comedy, given the very heavy (and arguably heavy-handed) tone of his films. And Snyder seemingly would agree with this assessment as he indicated in a recent appearance on the Film Junkee Vodka Stream. Asked if he would ever do an actual comedy, Snyder replied, "I don't have like a straight comedy that I can think, you know, that's like wall to wall straight comedy. If I did the Rick and Morty Movie that's probably about the closest I'd get."
Questions about Snyder potentially doing a comedy of course arise because Army of the Dead, though very much an action film with a very Snyder-like sense of pace and visual style, nevertheless includes a few moments that compared to other Snyder films count as humorous. In fact, much of the humor in Army of the Dead is provided by Tig Notaro, who plays a wise-cracking helicopter pilot (replacing Chris D’Elia who was erased from the film following sexual misconduct allegations), with a sprinkling of comedy from Matthias Schweighöfer as a safecracker who lacks experience at killing zombies. Mostly though, the film takes its insane premise of intelligent zombies battling would-be Vegas heist-perpetrators very seriously, in keeping with Snyder’s general approach.
Rick and Morty of course has little in common with something like Army of the Dead, being an animated sci-fi show created by the witty team of Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland. Indeed, any humor in Army of the Dead is more in the line of comic relief, and arguably lands with a thud amid the movie’s other much more serious business. It’s of course theoretically possible that Snyder might be chosen to direct a Rick and Morty movie were it ever to be made, but given his lack of any real comedic background whatsoever, it seems there would be many other people in line to get the gig before him. Then again, if this hypothetical Rick and Morty movie were to ever see the light of day, perhaps Harmon, Roiland and company would want someone with a Snyder-like visual sense to carry off the sci-fi action part of the equation while they themselves worried about the comedy. Perhaps Rick and Morty antics set in a slow-mo, shallow-focus Snyder-rendered world could work, but it sounds like a very strange and awkward combination.
Source: TheFilmJunkee/YouTube