Two years after his critically acclaimed ‘Dawn Of The Dead’ remake, Zack Snyder made his definitive breakthrough as a film director with the bloody and overly stylized adaptation of Frank Miller’s exaggerated historical comic ‘300’. After the film’s success, plans were quickly made for a sequel, but development took so long that Snyder was now too busy with the comic book company DC to take on production himself (the much less well-received sequel “300: Rise Of An Empire’, after which Noam Murro intervened).
But Snyder still hadn’t finished “300.” As his time at DC came to an end after “Man Of Steel”, “Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice” and “Justice League”, he worked on the script for a film about the legendary General Alexander the Great, which he closed, intended for the “300” trilogy. But soon the focus of the script shifted more and more to the relationship between Alexander and his friend and general Hephaestion.
The whole became one Mixture of gay love story and Greek war epic, which as the third “300” part no longer really worked for Snyder and was therefore renamed “Blood And Ashes”. However, he still wanted to perform the project at his then home studio Warner – but without success. Probably not least because it was already clear at the time that Snyder and Warner would go their separate ways after “Justice League” (despite the later publication of his “Justice League” director’s cut), Snyder was not given the green light – and the project seemed buried because the rights remained with Warner. But now there is a new glimmer of hope…
Zack Snyder once again owns the rights to “300 3”, also known as “Blood And Ashes”
As Zack Snyder personally told the industry newspaper revealed, He got the rights to “Blood And Ashes” back from Warner and was now able to take the project elsewhere (The streaming service Netflix, with which Snyder currently has an exclusive deal, would be ideal for this).
This means that Zack Snyder could still potentially make his heartfelt sequel ‘300’ happen, even though it will no longer be directly connected to the first two installments – especially if it is now made outside of Warner, which still owns the film rights to “300.” Nevertheless, given its origins, the film could still be based on the series in terms of aesthetics and atmosphere and could therefore at least become a spiritual successor.
So it’s a bit like Snyder’s most recent project, “Rebel Moon,” which he originally pitched unsuccessfully as a “Star Wars” film but then became something else under the Netflix umbrella.
Will “Blood And Ashes” come after “Rebel Moon”?
He said Snyder is definitely interested in making “Blood And Ashes” a reality already a bit teased: “I don’t know what the market is like for an incredibly homoerotic, super brutal, super sexual movie. But maybe he’s perfect.”
Whether he will find the time for that in the near future is quite the question, since he has his hands full with the aforementioned “Rebel Moon”., a whole new science fiction film, series and game universe should be created here. First up is “Rebel Moon – Part 1: Child of Fire,” which will be released on Netflix on December 22, 2023. “Rebel Moon – Part 2: The Scar Maker” follows on April 19, 2024.
In addition, Snyder actually had big plans to further expand his ‘Army Of The Dead’ universe. These have now been scaled back somewhat (a planned anime series will probably no longer happen), but a second part is probably not yet off the table. But the fact is: either way, there won’t be a shortage of Snyder stock in the near future.