Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon Will Have A 5-Hour-Long Director’s Cut

Zack Snyder, proprietor of mythic director’s cuts and other big-budget films with ripped guys in them, has a director’s cut for Rebel Moon planned. That movie, which will be released in two parts on Netflix December 22, will have an approximately four-hour runtime, and the director’s cut adds “close to an hour of extra content,” Snyder says in a Netflix interview.

“The director’s [cut] is a settle-in deep dive, which I have notoriously done throughout my career,” he continued. “I don’t know how I got into this director’s cut thing, but what I will say about it is that, for me, the director’s cuts have always been something I had to fight for in the past and nobody wanted it.”

Snyder’s decision is predictable—“nobody” might have wanted his cuts before, but they certainly do now. His 2021-released cut of 2017 movie Justice League was, in some ways, still petulant (“Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a reclamation, and a blow struck for unchecked artistic ego in the face of the endless (if maybe sometimes sensible) notes of meddling studio execs,” AV Club writes), and it also mobilized an army of wolfish fans. More movies with ripped guys in them, more!

Rebel Moon, the “story of a peaceful agrarian colony on the edge of the galaxy that finds itself threatened by the armies of the Imperium and its dark leader,” Netflix says, started as a Star Wars pitch and is equally appealing to the average ravenous nerd. Another director’s cut gives those people what they want (and it gives Netflix more, repulsive mounds of money), even if what they want is expensive explosions and unimaginative visions of space, as a Gamescom teaser trailer suggests of Rebel Moon.

“[W]ith Netflix, we shot scenes just for the director’s cut,” Snyder said. “So in that way, it’s really a revelation because it gives that second kick at the can for big fans, like a real discovery that they would not [otherwise] get. I’m really excited about it!” Sure. Same.