Zack Snyder is living high right now as 300 continues to cut through audiences as only half naked oily men can do, and he’s using his newfound clout to get some projects off the ground that might otherwise never happen. Obviously he’s got Watchmen, and it looks like he’ll finally be the guy to break the property’s long, long streak of never getting made (whether or not he’s the right guy is something I’ll leave up to the rest of you to worry about). He also has Sucker Punch, a fantastical, Alice in Wonderland sort of story about an abused girl trapped in an insane asylum (something about this tells me it’s going to be Tideland but without fighting the urge to walk out of the theater the whole running time). And now he’s announced Army of the Dead, a return to the zombie films that gave him his feature start, and one that he plans to make epic in scope.
"I feel like there hasn’t been a zombie movie on the scale that we want to do it," Snyder told Variety. The film is set in a quarantined Las Vegas (also the setting for some of Resident Evil: Extinction, by the way) and deals with a father who wants to save his daughter from the zombie hordes. Snyder is talking about using a similar green screen process from 300 for at least part of this film; that, combined with the way that he’s talking about scope, leads this reporter to believe we are going to see very large groups of zombies – and Army of the Dead, if you will – wreaked mass havoc and chaos in a way that only existed in between the Romero Dead films.
Snyder may or may not direct this one, but he will be producing it at Warner Bros. The script is being written by Joby Harold, who wrote Awake, an upcoming movie in which Hayden Christensen wakes up on the operating table in the middle of a surgery. While I applaud the torture of Christensen, I must admit this scenario is one of my nightmares.