Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is now two movies, and each one is getting a Snyder Cut “for adults”

A lot of filmmakers dream of making their Star Wars, meaning an original genre concept with a huge cultural impact and a real legacy, but few filmmakers take that as literally as Zack Snyder did for his upcoming Netflix project Rebel Moon. When it was first announced, Snyder said Rebel Moon was inspired by his love for Akira Kurosawa movies and Star Wars movies (which is like saying you love potato products and french fries so you’ve invented a new food called french fries), but what good is a Star Wars movie that’s only one movie? Nobody’s building their entire personality around one sci-fi/fantasy movie, that’s a waste of time.

Luckily, though, Zack Snyder has revealed that Rebel Moon is now two movies, and because he has spent the last few years being deified by a certain group of people on the Internet who will fall to their knees in ecstasy at this idea, both of those two movies will be getting some kind of “harder-edged” Snyder Cut at a later date. Those new edits, which Snyder teased in an interview with Vanity Fair, will be “strictly for adults,” explaining that “for fans of mine and people who are ready to take a deeper, harder dive, that’ll be fun for them.”

We don’t know exactly what that means, since Snyder movies don’t tend to be full of sex (he skews more toward Michael Bay-style objectification of women rather than anyone ever actually doing it, so it’s just horny enough for a teenage boy to think it’s cool but not horny enough for a teenage boy to get in trouble for watching it), but it sounds terrifying either way. Zack Snyder’s unchecked ego and love for Randian self-aggrandizement, streaming on Netflix for two/four movies… you know, maybe this really shouldn’t be watched by kids. At least when George Lucas was forcing his political ideology into a movie it was “Nazis are bad” and “the Iraq War was a mistake.” Meanwhile Zack Snyder’s the guy giving a cutesy cameo in his zombie movie to a member of the Trump Administration.

If you would actually like to know more about Rebel Moon, beyond the fact that it is just Zack Snyder’s Star Wars (a thing he tries to get out ahead of in the piece, but it doesn’t work), the Vanity Fair story does go surprisingly deep on its mythology and the various characters who will show up, like the fugitive from an oppressive space-government who is hiding out near a farm on a middle-of-nowhere planet, or the “mercenary starship pilot” who owns the junky-looking space-freighter that our ragtag group of heroes needs in order to get off-world. Would you believe there’s also an ancient religious order? Or a spaceship that Snyder refers to as a “world destroyer” that can destroy a planet by shooting at it?

But no, this isn’t Star Wars, and you can tell because Snyder specifically feels the need to say that this isn’t Star Wars: “Anything that has a spaceship in it is going to be: ‘This is blank’s Star Wars.’ So I understand and sort of welcome the comparisons. But at the same time, I do believe that our thing is really an entirely different experience.” Uh huh. Well, we’ll know for sure when the first Rebel Moon premieres on Netflix in December.