Will The Failure of ‘Rebel Moon’ Earn Zack Snyder a Trip to Director’s Jail?

The long and arduous to another Snyder Cut has been completed. Last weekend, Netflix released the over six hours of reconstituted Rebel Moon, Zack Snyder’s two-part sci-fi epic. Unencumbered by a theater-free streaming service’s apparent demand that he turn in something the MPAA would award a PG-13, Snyder delivered what he’s been promising for nearly a year: His unfettered vision for a sci-fi fantasy world where lots and lots and lots of people have their heads exploded. I joke, but I also enjoy: the loopy bozo-Dune muchness of Rebel Moon is part of the fun of watching a Zack Snyder film – usually multiple times, because there’s always a director’s cut coming. That’s his galaxy-brained appeal. But the sheer scale and volume of this particular Snyder Cut also prompts the question of what the hell he could possibly do next.

I’m not asking how Snyder can possibly top Rebel Moon. There are many ways he could do that, whether by going bigger or (more likely) smaller while maintaining his image-making, splash-page-on-screen conviction. It’s more a question of whether Snyder is still in good with the Netflix suits, and whether he might be able to find purchase elsewhere if he’s not. Though he’s spoken of Rebel Moon as a potential franchise with many more cinematic installments (among other components), Snyder recently told The Wrap that while he has spoken to new-ish Netflix film chief Dan Lin, the conversation wasn’t specifically about more Rebel Moon installments. From the sound of it, he and his wife/producing partner Deborah Snyder aren’t sure what’s next. (While we won’t have access to its viewership for a few weeks, initial signs are that each of the Rebel Moon director’s cuts were viewed by roughly 80% fewer people than the original releases.)

As the Wrap piece mentions, Snyder once had world-building plans for Army of the Dead, his first post project at Netflix after leaving the DC Universe. This did yield the prequel/spinoff heist movie Army of Thieves, but a planned animated series failed to materialize, and at a recent Rebel Moon screening in Los Angeles, Snyder didn’t sound particularly bullish on the future of a potential Rebel Moon cartoon, either.

The truth is, this is the first time in the better part of a decade that Snyder hasn’t had some kind of magnum-opus director’s cut rattling around in his head. (At least as far as we know.) He left Justice League before it was finished due to an unworkable combination of family tragedy and executive interference, and while he later jumped to Netflix for Army of the Dead, he clearly didn’t stop thinking about his own version of the superhero team-up, which Warner Bros. eventually paid to make into a reality. Actually, more of a hyperreality: the four-hour “Snyder Cut” as it appeared on Max was likely far more elaborate than anything Snyder had planned for the film originally, as he obviously knew that he wouldn’t be doing a four-hour superhero movie for thousands of multiplex screens. Snyder’s eventual Justice League was a hybrid of director’s cut and ever-shifting pie-in-the-sky wishlist come to life.

You could argue something similar about Rebel Moon. These two new movies are billed as director’s cuts, and they technically are, but they aren’t cuts that Snyder turned in to Netflix before reforming them into PG-13 versions. He knew he was making two different versions from the jump, often shooting different versions of scenes during production.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this; it’s a different way of making movies, and certainly not an uninteresting one. It’s even a bit refreshing that Snyder isn’t such a purist about his work, referring to the different versions of Rebel Moon as akin to alternate universes. (This is a stretch, considering the director’s cuts have almost exactly the same story as the shorter versions, but at least isn’t too fussy about the idea of canon.) Taken together, though, Snyder’s director’s-cutting does suggest a filmmaker forever daydreaming about movies that he considers perpetually unfinished. There’s something perverse, for example, that Snyder was given funds and seemingly unlimited running time to make his supersized Justice League, allowing him bring some closure to his now alternate-world vision of the DC universe in the process, and he essentially deferred on giving it an ending. Instead, Justice League ends with an extended vision of some other cockamamie sequel Snyder supposedly would have made in his perfect world, where Superman – newly resurrected from the dead, mind you – re-loses his mind and brings about an apocalypse, all based on an extremely dark and stupid DC video game. (So Snyder’s grand vision for the DC Comics brand on screen was… make a video game into a movie.) It’s a baffling decision that seems designed to whip the worst fans into another frenzy over a movie that would require an entire alternate reality in our world, not just DC’s, to be made. Ending with an excited announcement of the next installment, extant or not, seems to be Snyder’s preference, even or especially if it may not arrive; if the original second part of Rebel Moon sequel teases, the director’s cut offers a more explicit cliffhanger.

But does Snyder even want to make the next installment, or does he simply want people to want it? He doesn’t sound particularly bullish in recent interviews. Maybe it would help if someone agreed to finance it, and then take it away from him in some capacity, to give him a director’s cut to look forward to. The last time one of his movies didn’t have a much-ballyhooed expanded version was 2013’s Man of Steel, over a decade ago. In fact, that, Army of the Dead, and 300 are his only movies without some kind of alternate edition (and all three of those have sequels, prequels, or other extensions of some kind). Sucker Punch, for example, should be the most stand-alone thing Snyder has made; instead, it has an extended edition on Blu-ray, and though it does improve the movie substantially, Snyder is also careful to say that it’s not his actual director’s cut which would, of course, require more money to actually finish. He’s said he’d love to do it someday.

Again, this is not necessarily a judgment. Some filmmakers are inveterate tinkerers. You could program a lengthy film festival only using variant cuts of Michael Mann and Ridley Scott movies. Some of them are better, some of them are worse, and some of them have differences that only a superfan would detect. Like Snyder, those guys always seem to find another studio willing to give them the money they need to realize their next vision. Unlike Snyder, their movies don’t seem to be world-building toward a grander climax they haven’t bothered to articulate yet. It seems inevitable that some studio or streamer will want Snyder and his fanbase on their side, at least for the length of a movie or two. But Rebel Moon – fun as it is to sort through its silliness, its influence, and its moments of genuine inspiration – now seems like a warning that the universe’s in Snyder’s head aren’t necessarily made to be realized. They’re made to be promised, to enhance the brainstorming around his latest project. I don’t doubt Snyder’s sincere love of this stuff. I do wonder, though, if all of his epic world-building and extended-cutting amounts to him constantly plea-bargaining his way out of director’s jail.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.