gamescom may be a giant celebration of, well, games, but Zack Snyder and wife and co-producer Deborah Snyder crashed the party to talk about their big upcoming sci-fi film, Rebel Moon. Zack Snyder took the Opening Night Live stage last night to show off the latest trailer for Rebel Moon, as well as unveil the release date for Part 2: April 19, 2024. As previously announced, the first part will debut on Netflix on Dec. 22.
The Snyders also found the time to drop by IGN’s gamescom studio to go into more details on their big new sci-fi world, the upcoming video game that’s being developed within it, which video games he’d like to adapt for the big screen, and a whole lot more. Check out our full chat below.
IGN: Last night, Opening Night Live at gamescom, you showed the trailer for Rebel Moon. But to begin, at the beginning, Rebel Moon was famously an idea for Star Wars. What changes have you been able to make now that it’s no longer tied to an existing universe?
Zack Snyder: Well, it was an evolution anyway. When we started working on the idea, before even it was a Star Wars movie in my mind, it was a “put a team together” movie. There’s an adult illustrated fantasy magazine called Heavy Metal that I always was in love with, just the tone of that really was inspirational to me. Even when I was in the early talks with Kathleen Kennedy about maybe making a Star Wars movie, I would say things like, “Maybe it could be rated R.” And they would say, “Yeah, no, that’s crazy.” So I knew it was going to be a bit of a slog. But then after the sale, and they had their own sort of vision for what the Star Wars universe would be, it was clear to me pretty much at that point that it wasn’t going to be anything to do with this idea. And Debbie was super happy about that because she thought-
Deborah Snyder: I was really happy. Well, I felt like he envisioned this as something that was wholly original. And I felt – like, I know after working a decade on DC what canon means and what it means to the fans – and I just felt like there would be too many rules and that he could really kind of go crazy if it was something that was original and the handcuffs were off.
Well, from the footage that we’ve seen, I’d say it has a very different visual look from Star Wars, maybe more like a space sword and sandal epic than sci-fi. Is that accurate?
Zack Snyder: Yeah, I would say, yeah. I feel like it’s science fantasy more than, say, hard science fiction. And I think that that was really what I always wanted to do to begin with. It’s more of A Knight’s Tale than, say, in the tradition of even the costumes and everything, I really wanted this sort of ornate, kind of ancient kingdom that the Mother World represents was a thing that I was really interested in and sort of aesthetically kind of pursuing. Even the robots seem old. And I guess that was really a thing that I was inspired by and kind of chasing in the design. Yeah, so definitely, I think in answer to the original question, is it’s gone on a huge evolution since those early days.
You got a great cast for this film, by the way. I believe Sir Anthony Hopkins is playing a particular robot. Can you can tell us about that character?
Zack Snyder: So he plays what we call affectionately Jimmy. That’s not his real name, but that’s what they call the robots. All the robots are Jimmy’s. And yeah, he plays one of what, a pretty kind of typical battle robot in this world. The only thing that’s interesting about these robots is that after the king and Issa are killed and the queen are killed, the robots whose initial purpose was to protect the royal family, they kind of don’t know what to do themselves. And so they end up kind of becoming these sort of conscientious objectors. They don’t really fight anymore. And so there’s this whole journey of discovery that Jimmy’s on, that Anthony Hopkins robot, it’s on. But he’s one of many. He’s this one many robots that would kind of be in this same moral quandary that he’s in.
Can you tell us more about the Imperium, the sort of evil empire at the center of Rebel Moon?
Zack Snyder: Yeah. So the mother, I affectionately, we call the Mother World, and their forces are an ancient civilization that have over the years sort of been led by a single king or line of kings. And they sort of have used up all the resources on their own planet, and then basically set off into the stars and basically have been collecting and expanding for thousands of years.
Sofia Boutella leads the warriors as Kora. How’d you end up casting Sofia? What was it like working with her?
Zack Snyder: Sofia’s amazing. I had her in mind really from the beginning. I would tell Debbie about, “Oh, I really wanted Sofia to be this character.” And everyone was like, “Okay, that could be cool, but we should probably look for, do a real audition and-“
Go through the motions.
Zack Snyder: Yeah, go through… I was like, “Okay, well sure, but I’m pretty-“
Deborah Snyder: And we tested five women. And Sofia really just shined through because it’s such a difficult role because her character is so complex. She’s also the heart of the film. But she also, the physicality required to do the role is just – it was so important to us that it was believable that she was this amazing warrior. And she has a dance background and incredibly, she learned all the choreography so quick and she wanted to do all of the fighting herself. And she did other than one: we were going to throw her character off the side of a scaffolding and we were all like, “That’s not really safe for you to do.” She wanted to do it, but everything else she did all her own fighting.
It’s been announced that Rebel Moon is going to be a two-parter. What was the reasoning behind that? And do you know the total runtime of them both put together?
Zack Snyder: Movie two we’re still-
Still working on.
Zack Snyder: … cutting, so I don’t know the exact runtime, but they’re about two hours each the movies themselves, right around two hours. I think movie two is under two hours right now. What was the first part of the question?
What was the reasoning, the thinking behind that? Is it just because you needed more time to-
Zack Snyder: Yeah, so I had written a pretty long script, 200-page script. And the cool thing about Netflix was when I said maybe a way to go is to just break it into two movies because for sure I could cut it to one, but it’s going to kind of make the movie vary by the numbers when you get that, especially a movie like this that’s sort of genre-specific, we know the mission, got to put the team together. You got to prepare for battle and then fight them. Not that that’s what’s going to happen, but that becomes kind of obvious. And then when you really put the screws to something like that, the beats become really set in stone and there’s not a lot of room to move around. And I think by letting it be two movies, it really let us kind of have a lot more character and a lot more worlds to visit and just be more overall exotic and unexpected.
There’s a Rebel Moon game also coming from Super Evil Megacorp, developer of the very good Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle: Splintered Fate game, which is on Apple Arcade. I recommend it. Anything else you can tell us about the game of Rebel Moon?
Zack Snyder: Well, one thing I could say about it is that the guys over there have been incredibly reverent and faithful to the source material, and they’ve been incredibly inclusive and really want to talk with me constantly about mythology and about the canon and about the world. And so, I would say that though, as a game, it really will expand the mythology of the universe. Even though it’s definitely an add-on to the universe I didn’t expect, it was a cool place where we thought to explore other things that are happening in the Rebel Moon universe. And the guys have been great to… I’d say, “Guys, we can’t. We can’t do that.” And then they’d come back, “Well, what about this?” And so we were really, I think able to land on something that was really world building, but also consistent with the world. So that is fun.
Well, we’re here at the world’s biggest gaming convention, so I have to ask you, is there any gaming property that you both think would make a great movie?
Deborah Snyder: There are…
Zack Snyder: Well, there are a lot. We’ve talked about a bunch of – Gears [of War] has always come up in sort of our circle.
Interesting.
Zack Snyder: And I was a fan of the game, so off the top of my head, that one. I was always interested in the Halo franchise, so that was something that I’d always, and they of course kind of made that, but it was something I always thought could be incredible.
For more out of gamescom, check out our full interview with Phil Spencer, as well as everything announced at Opening Night Live.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
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