Whether you love or hate Zack Snyder, you cannot deny he has a distinctive style. Your average Snyder joint will feature copious amounts of slow motion, a desaturated color palette and a generally foreboding tone. It made him a great fit for Dawn of the Dead, to be the steward of Warner Bros.’ DCEU and now, in an unlikely twist, the director of a very special episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
This lengthy skit features Snyder and Colbert poking fun at his directorial proclivities, as Zack Snyder’s The Late Show sees Colbert being put through a punishing training program to get chiseled abs, expensive CGI used to recreate a plain desk, a slow-mo Flash-like knife dodge and, awesomely, a riff on the Knightmare future of Justice League in which Colbert interviews Jared Leto’s Joker.
But my favorite has to be the ending, where Colbert and Snyder both conclude with: “Suck it, Warner Brothers.” After all the crap that the studio has thrown the director’s way, it’s a cathartic moment, especially when the sketch finishes off with a (dark and stormy) Paramount logo captioned: “A Mountain of Suck It Warner Brothers.” For the last few years, Snyder has had to be diplomatic when it comes to the studio in order to allow him to finish his cut of Justice League, but now that it’s out, he can drop the pretence and say what he really feels about how they treated him.
https://twitter.com/colbertlateshow/status/1397765325903470597?s=20
After Army of the Dead, Snyder is something of a free agent. He’s currently planning to film the smaller scale movie Horse Latitudes, about two men inspired by a photograph who travel to South America, but that’s on hold due to COVID-19 restrictions. Beyond that, he’s said he wants to tackle Arthurian mythology in the American West, which certainly sounds like an interesting project.
And then there are the lingering questions about whether he’d ever return to the DCEU. In the wake of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the prognosis was negative, but with the WarnerMedia/Discovery merger, we may see a clearing out of WB executives and a change in strategy at the studio, so who knows? In the meantime, after the success of both Justice League and Army of the Dead, it’s looking like we’re entering a Zack Snyder renaissance.