Zack Snyder has a list and is ticking off projects guaranteed to get people up in arms. Remake the greatest zombie film ever? Check. Piss off the entire nation of Iran? Check. Tackle the pinnacle of comic books? Check. Now he’s going after none other than Mr. Ray Bradbury… well, okay, maybe Bradbury isn’t quite as much hallowed ground as those other properties, but Snyder is remaking a movie that starred Rod Steiger! Now that’s got to get internet nerds riled up.
Snyder has signed a deal to redo The Illustrated Man, a collection of Bradbury short stories with a framing device of a dude with mysterious animated tattoos that tell the wacky scifi tales. The book has 18 stories, while the Steiger movie adapted three of them. Conceptually, that could mean Snyder could pick any of the other 15 stories to play with – I hope he goes with the one where black people colonized Mars and has Tyler Perry play all the roles!
Alex Tse, who is writing Watchmen with Snyder, is going to script this film. I only read one of Tse’s drafts of Watchmen, and it was like the excellent David Hayter version, but with stupid shit thrown in. My understanding is that the version that will be going in front of cameras in a few short weeks will be very different.
This is a fascinating project because the conventional wisdom is that anthology movies don’t play. But it seems to me that Snyder has been building a career based on flaunting the conventional wisdom, and maybe in a couple of years we’ll see a whole horde of anthology pictures coming down the pike.