Zach Snyder is no stranger helming massive, overly ambitious projects. Apparently Lucasfilm felt the same way, as several years ago Snyder was tapped to film a Star Wars project. Then, upon seeing the finished project, Lucasfilm turned their noses up at it and consigned it to the trash heap. Snyder and his production crew were livid, after putting countless hours into this project, only to have it shut down? Most people would have just given up. Instead Snyder and his team pulled a hail mary, and sold the rejected project to Netflix.
The cancelled film in question is called ‘Rebel Moon’, and everyone is now learning what a massive mistake Disney/Lucasfilm made. In a series of interviews Snyder shared with fans what exactly happened. Originally he had been tapped to film a stand-alone movie about a Jedi who tries to convince a moon colony to stand against the Empire. The original movie would have been, ‘Rebel Moon: A Star Wars Story’, has a nice ring doesn’t it? But Snyder related that from the beginning the production was difficult. The director explained that he wanted to split the movie into two separate parts, which Lucasfilm didn’t want. Then Snyder discussed his frustrations with Lucasfilm trying to dictate the script, Snyder said that he wanted ‘Rebel Moon’ to be its own movie, while the executives wanted him to to go in a more nostalgic direction. On and on it went. Apparently neither side was able to get along with each other. Nevertheless the movie was filmed and when the executives at Lucasfilm screened the pre-production, they rejected it. ‘Rebel Moon’ was dead.
Snyder talked about how angry he was, and not just him, the production crew and the cast were upset as well. Rathe than simply quit, a decision was reached, remove the Star Wars references and sell the project to another studio, but who? Netflix was the first name to come up. Partly because Snyder had worked with Netflix before and to great success. Netflix executives bought that ‘Rebel Moon’ was great and decided to bankroll the project. Not only that, but they would let Snyder complete the project to fit his original vision.
On Dec. 20 of this year, ‘Rebel Moon Part 1’ will be available to stream. Part 2 will be just a few months ahead. I for one am very excited about the project, and I’ll tell you why. For one I think Zach Snyder is a little overly ambitious at times, but a genius nonetheless. I remember I watched the movie ‘Justice League’ not too long ago and I legitimately enjoyed it, but still felt that the movie needed a little more. Then I saw ‘Zach Snyders Justice League’ on Max, basically the directors cut of the movie, and I was blown away. The directors cut is nothing short of a masterpiece. It made me wonder how many other movies were crippled by ruthless editing. The directors cut of ‘Justice League’ convinced me that when studios get out of the way and let Snyder have creative control, great things will happen.
I’ve watched every single trailer for ‘Rebel Moon’. From what I’ve seen so far, ‘Rebel Moon’ has the look and feel of a sci-fi epic.
I get the feeling that this will be a genuinely special project, this will be something different. Part 1 is titled ‘The Girl of Fire’, and will follow a protagonist, Ki, who possess strange abilities and comes across an independent moon world, filled with monsters. Nice.
I also would point out that this is a strategic move for Netflix. For this year Netflix announced they were cutting 80 million dollars worth of acquisitions, and I fully agreed with the move. (Not that they asked my opinion anyway) Netflix has spent far too much money on way too many projects that no one even cared about. By bankrolling a massive project like ‘Rebel Moon’, Netflix is signaling that they want to become a more premium streaming service.
Granted none of us have seen ‘Rebel Moon’ just yet, so we can’t really comment on how good or terrible film will be. Here’s something I can comment on, the movie look absolutely amazing. The question I have is, if ‘Rebel Moon’ really does end up being a great movie, then what other cancelled projects are out there? What other great movies were denied us simply because some shortsighted executive couldn’t see the vision?
