An analysis of his career shows a worrying trend
Zack Snyder’s career is not full of box office failures, quite the opposite. But since he went from being a biller of more or less infallible blockbusters to a creator obsessed with the control of production companies (and with it, multiplying the versions of his films, seeking to satisfy fans and the box office with director’s cuts of all his proposals), and despite his indisputable fame, his infallibility at the box office is in question.
A filmography of hits… It is indisputable that Snyder started his career with a string of box office bombs that made him an absolute number one in the industry. ‘Dawn of the Dead’, more than one hundred million in collection on a meager budget of 26 million. ‘300’, 456 in collection over only 60 in budget. ‘Man of Steel’, 668 grossed compared to 225 budget. And ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’, with a similar budget, grossed over $800 million. Even a more difficult film to sell like ‘Ga’Hoole: Legend of the Guardians’ performed well, coming close to doubling its 80 million budget at the box office.
…and failures. From the beginning, his aesthetic ambitions and his devotion to firefighter ideas also guaranteed him some failure. ‘Sucker Punch’ (paradoxically, still his best film today), only raised 89 million of the 82 it cost (which means clear losses). And although ‘Watchmen’ did not have such significant losses, it certainly was not a great success: 187 million raised against a budget of 150 million. Especially the latter, it was a very relative failure, since the non-material benefit that revitalizing ‘Watchmen’ meant for DC is difficult to quantify. But possibly, it more than compensated him. Snyder was not a guarantee of success, but he was an important asset at Warner at that time.
The key moment. ‘Justice League’, with its peculiar story of comings and goings (Snyder had to leave the filming of what was going to be DC’s ‘The Avengers’ due to the tragic death of his daughter, and was replaced by Joss Whedon, who left her unrecognizable with reshoots and a montage that betrayed Snyder’s original concept), was a before and after for him. Not only did the film mark the beginning of the debacle of DC hero films, with more sorrow than joy from then on, but it also launched the disastrous #releasethesnydercut movement, which marked a before and after in the interference of fans in the plans majors.
Race with Netflix. It was with Netflix that he began a series of projects that, like so many of his other films, are based on the regurgitation of previous concepts: ‘Army of the Dead’ was based on ‘Dawn of the Dead’, and Netflix wanted its own with it. zombie franchise. It didn’t work particularly well: plans for a long saga were silenced, and a strange prequel that not many people saw, ‘Army of Thieves’, also came to nothing. And ‘Rebel Moon’ was a rehash of an idea for the ‘Star Wars’ franchise that Snyder had, and its status as a second-hand product is evident.
The new prick of ‘Rebel Moon’. Although the absolute figures are not bad (the second installment of Rebel Moon has risen to the top of the most viewed films this week on the platform, its numbers are even lower than those of the first installment), it has already garnered the worst reviews of the race by Snyder. The director assures that the authentic version of the films is in the future Snyder’s Cut, already an almost inseparable part of each of the films in his filmography, but at this point it sounds more like an excuse than anything else. Snyder needs something to spark his career and, against all odds, Netflix’s blank checks seem to do him more harm than good.
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