Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon films will get two cuts apiece – and Netflix is fully on board with the plan.
Netflix’s biggest film of the holiday season – at least in terms of financial outlay – is its investment in the world of director Zack Snyder. In exchange for more money any of us will see in our lives, Snyder is making Rebel Moon, what looks like his two-part ode to the world of Star Wars.
The first of the two films, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child Of Fire, is debuting on December 15th, and it’s already known that Snyder has cut two versions of the film. There’s the PG-13-rated cut, that comes in at just over two hours, and an R-rated version coming later down the line that runs suitably longer.
This heads off at the pass the shenanigans that followed Snyder’s earlier film, Justice League, where Warner Bros notably mandated a two hour cut and brought in a different director to complete the film. Then, years later, a sizeable fan campaign persuaded the studio to stump up $70m for a Snyder cut version of the film, which pretty much doubled the running time.
Long story short: Netflix looks like it’s decided to build that in. Snyder has started giving interviews for the first of the films, and in a piece with Entertainment Weekly, he reveals that it was Netflix who argued that he should “go back to your original subversive R-rated version.”
Snyder then told him that the streamer said “you could do your thing and we could have that as a separate piece of” – and here comes the most horrible word in modern movies – “content”.
Snyder it seems had no problems making the PG-13 cut of the film, and is happy with it. In this instance, he hadn’t originally planned to go for something tougher on top of that. But that he’s, as you might expect, really rather pleased that he gets to give us both versions of his movie from the off this time around.
You’ll be hearing a lot more about the Rebel Moon films in the months ahead. In the meantime, the Entertainment Weekly piece can be found here…
