If they won't let Zack Snyder make a stupid Star Wars, he'll just make his own stupid Star Wars

Zack Snyder has lined up his next project at Netflix, the streaming platform that released his Sean Spicer-starring zombie thriller Army Of The Dead, and holy shit, it sounds like a truly inspired move from the guy whose filmography is stuffed full of him doing bad imitations of better filmmakers and/or woefully misinterpreting an original piece of text. You know how there are people who just get it? The people who—as the kids say—understood the assignment? Well, there are people like that, and then there’s Zack Snyder.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Snyder’s next Netflix project is “an epic sci-fi fantasy” called Rebel Moon, and he’ll be directing and co-writing alongside Army Of The Dead’s Shay Hatten and 300's Kurt Johnstad. As for what it’s about, have you seen Star Wars? It’s like Star Wars, except… Zack Snyder is making it. Here’s the synopsis, via THR:

The story is set in motion when a peaceful colony on the edge of the galaxy is threatened by the armies of a tyrannical regent named Balisarius. Desperate people dispatch a young woman with a mysterious past to seek out warriors from neighboring planets to help them make a stand.

Snyder put an even finer point on it by saying that Rebel Moon (which would also be an appropriate name for Star Wars) is inspired by his childhood “as an Akira Kurosawa fan, a Star Wars fan,” and that it showcases his “love of sci-fi and a giant adventure.” Oh, so it’s a sci-fi movie inspired by Akira Kurosawa? You mean like fucking Star Wars? It’s like saying “I really like old ‘40s adventure serials and Indiana Jones, so I’m making a movie called Fedora Johnny about a guy who fights Nazis and thinks things should be in a museum.” Hoo boy, this Snyder guy is exhausting.

Also, the Star Wars-y stuff is less of an inspiration and more of a… what do you call it when you pitch a Star Wars movie to LucasFilm and they don’t call you back? Because that’s what this is. Snyder says he started developing this idea as a “more mature take” on Star Wars a decade ago, and he considered making it as a TV show when the movie didn’t pan out. Now, though, he has more or less filed off the serial numbers and Battle In Space—err, Rebel Moon—is becoming a Netflix movie that he hopes to start making early next year. Snyder told THR that he has spent “the last two or three years building out this universe” and has been “doing designs” and “really cultivating [the project’s] fertile ground to make this world fully realized.”

That may sound like a lot of work for a movie that might start production in six months, but Wookiepedia has done most of the hard stuff for him already. He just has to do a find-and-replace to change “Darth Vader” to “Balisarius” and “Obi-Wan Kenobi” to “warriors from neighboring planets,” and then Snyder can go back to rereading The Fountainhead.