Is ‘Rebel Moon’ connected to ‘Star Wars?’

There aren’t a lot of directors that generate buzz around the films they’re working on quite like Zack Snyder, and there aren’t a lot of films that Zack Snyder is working on that aren’t Rebel Moon.

So let’s talk about it. Rebel Moon, which hits theaters on Dec. 15, 2023, before moving to Netflix a week later, might seem achingly familiar to anyone who’s been to see a Star Wars movie in the last 46 years. Damningly, Snyder has described it as being inspired by both Star Wars and the works of Akira Kurosawa, the guy who made The Hidden Fortress… which is to say, the inspiration behind Star Wars.

None of this is an accident. Snyder originally pitched Rebel Moon to Lucasfilm as a gritty, edgy, presumably very, very speed-ramp-heavy reimagining of the Star Wars universe. It would be his Snyder-y contribution to a galaxy far, far away: Grungy, mean, and Leonard Cohen plugged in somewhere if I were a betting man. Life being what it is, the whole thing fell apart when the company was purchased by Disney, a company with a history of poo-pooing sex, extreme violence, and profanity in their tentpole franchises. We’re not worried about Deadpool 3; you are.

When the idea for an ultraviolent addition to their whooshy glowstick space wizard saga was scrapped at the House of Mouse, Snyder took Rebel Moon to other studios. Reskinning it with painted-over Rebel Alliance insignias, he pitched it as a movie and television series at Warner Bros. and tried to sell it as a triple-A video game in the vein of Starfield or Mass Effect. Ultimately, Netflix picked up the ball, funding what they hope will be the next generation of classic spacefaring escapism. Expectations and the budget are high, with the streaming service dropping an estimated $160 million on Snyder’s two-part epic. The project marks the latest addition to the uneasy partnership between Snyder and Netflix, with a proposed animated Army of the Dead prequel recently scrapped.

Rebel Moon is set in a used-future science fiction dystopia, where a former member of an oppressive fascist regime tries to atone for their past by joining a group of scrappy rebels. Spaceship fights featuring scrappy, rogueish ne’er-do-wells met in disreputable bars and sci-fi sword fights ensue as the audience is introduced to colorful characters like tired robot knights, magical recluses with the power to commune with nature, and wow, they really, really didn’t try to make this seem like anything except Star Wars, did they?