Rebel Moon was (at one point) a Videogame
Just last night, I was one of many lucky people to have been selected by 1iota to attend a fan screening of Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver. I wouldn’t have considered us so lucky were it not for the fact that the films’ director, Zack Snyder did a free signing of his photography book, The Portraits of Rebel Moon. Afterwards the order of events would be that we see part two, and listen in on an extensive Q&A with both Zack and Deborah Snyder, as well as the lead producing team of the Rebel Moon films.
I thought the big newsworthy moment of the Q&A would be any additional details regarding the director’s cuts (two 3-hour films with no release date confirmed), but the bit that caught my attention is as the title suggests. When on the topic of the evolution of these films, Deborah gave us a pretty interesting idea about Rebel Moon’s intended medium. “This idea has been kicking around for so long [maybe 20 years]. And it was a germ of an idea and then Zack would talk about some things and then it was a video game at one point, and it was a television series at one point and then I think we had a conversation and I said, it should be a movie.”
How I unpacked this was that not only is/was Zack Snyder interested in entering the game development space, but also that his wife and longtime collaborator steered him away from doing so with Rebel Moon. There’s implications with this that make me wonder how far into conception or early production this potential videogame has gone before ultimately being retooled for the screen, but when you put this in perspective with Zack’s love for Fortnite, it’s no stretch to imagine one of America’s great filmmakers as a bizzaro version of Hideo Kojima someday. Taking actors with a celebrity status and his overall knowledge of filmmaking and injecting that into the medium of videogames could serve as a wonderful intersection for fans of these two different artforms.
It’s worth noting that Rebel Moon not only has a limited comic book run and that there’s open ending to The Scargiver. So there’s still a chance that the Rebel Moon story could continue as a game if Zack’s liking towards games strengthens over time and if the movies perform well algorithmically. There’s a way to make Netflix’s game production branch make sense to me. Or maybe he’d enter the game development arena with an entirely different IP. We just got to see which news outlet (if any) will press him for details on that.
As for the actual movies themselves, I’m not going to have an opinion on them until I’ve seen the director’s cuts which are supposed to be released same day. From the extra hour duration for each film down to “fundamentally different line deliveries”, it seems to me like it’s going to be far superior. But that’s another rant for another time. While we wait for those to be released, you can check out both of these “PG-13” edition Rebel Moon entries on Netflix Friday April 19th…
