As an active presence on both Twitter and his beloved Vero, Zack Snyder is fully aware of the fervent following generated by his work, especially when it came to his fable original vision for Justice League. While you could cynically boil the existence of HBO Max’s four-hour superhero epic down to a marketing ploy designed to cause an increase in subscriber numbers, it would have never been given the green light in the first place if the appetite wasn’t there.
The filmmaker’s output tends to be fairly polarizing among critics and general audiences, but his supporters will back him to the hilt, as evidenced by the numerous campaigns surrounding the SnyderVerse and the fact his Justice League holds the highest audience score out of any DCEU blockbuster on Rotten Tomatoes.
So, when he took his talents to Netflix and directed Army of the Dead, it was virtually guaranteed to be a massive success. The undead actioner lived up to the hype, scoring some of the best reviews of Snyder’s career and becoming one of the platform’s ten most-watched original movies ever.
However, in a recent interview he revealed the the success of the genre-bending zombie effort came as a surprise to him, despite a prequel having already been filmed before Army of the Dead was even released, as well as an animated companion series.
“We were talking to Netflix about the success so far and we were all laughing. For me, honestly, I was like, ‘Ah, this will be a fun genre romp’, and I had a feeling we could do it well and that people would enjoy it and that it would be big on the service, but what it’s become has been very exciting for us because we really love this world too and to see it grow is really fun.”
Netflix and Snyder were at the very least confident Army of the Dead would hit big seeing as two companion projects were already deep into production by the time the franchise-launcher arrived, but at least they now know for sure that there’s a huge audience eager to see where the universe heads from here, with a sequel also having been announced.
