Shortly before being named as one Netflix’s most-watched original movies ever, it was confirmed that an Army of the Dead sequel had been placed into active development after Zack Snyder’s Stone Quarry Productions signed a first-look development deal with the streamer.
It always felt inevitable given that the platform is on a mission to acquire as many big name in-house properties as possible, and few do world-building on an epic scale better than Snyder. We’ve now got Army of the Dead 2, Army of Thieves and the animated Lost Vegas on the way, and there’s no doubt plenty more to come.
The director has been teasing that he’s got some wild and crazy ideas in store for the second installment, and we’re hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us The Witcher was getting a prequel spinoff long before Blood Origin was announced – that it might involve bringing back the entire principal cast, despite almost all of them having been killed.
Army of the Dead made a brief mention of a time loop theory, with Omari Hardwick’s Vanderohe theorizing that the crack team of mercenaries and thieves had pulled the exact same mission before, except in a different reality. According to our information, this is one of the ideas being bandied around for the follow up, which would reunite the core crew but tell a completely different story that uses the time loop as its narrative hook.
It would certainly be an unexpected and undeniably fascinating experiment to use a blockbuster-sized budget to tell exactly the same story from a completely different angle, but Zack Snyder doesn’t exactly make straightforward crowd-pleasers, and Netflix will hand him the complete freedom to go for broke as Army of the Dead continues to expand.