Yesterday saw the first teaser trailer for Army of Thieves arrive, and it looks to be an entirely different type of film from Army of the Dead. The connective tissue is there, but the prequel looks to be much more of a self-contained story that happens to take place in a world where the undead uprising has caused chaos and havoc in Las Vegas.
It’s an interesting approach to world-building, but that’s to be expected when Zack Snyder is involved. At various points, the filmmaker has compared Army of Thieves to The Italian Job, Ocean’s Eleven and a romantic comedy. Based on both the footage and the fact it takes place six years before Army of the Dead and on the other side of the planet, there doesn’t seem to be much direct connective tissue either, other than the presence of leading man and director Matthias Schweighöfer, as well as the exact same vault he knows how to crack in the recent Netflix smash hit.
We’re now hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us Netflix were giving The Witcher a spinoff long before Blood Origin was announced – that Army of Thieves isn’t going to feature any zombies at all. Of course, news clips were seen in the debut promo so the events at large are going to be referenced at points, but shuffling hordes of the undead will reportedly have no bearing whatsoever on the actual narrative.
Netflix and Snyder are keen to build out the Army of the Dead universe as much as possible, and tackling a variety of different stories in other genres that don’t have to rely on the tropes and archetypes of the zombie genre is definitely one way to go about it.
