Zack Snyder Hypes His Netflix Movie ‘Army of the Dead’ as “Pure Zombie Mayhem”

After years in the making, Zack Snyder‘s zombie heist movie is finally premiering on Netflix later this year. And thanks to Entertainment Weekly, we’ve got our very first glimpse at the highly anticipated genre-mashup featuring talents like action star Dave Bautista and comedian Tig Notaro.

EW, which shared the exclusive first look at Snyder’s Army of the Dead this morning, also spoke with the director about his latest film, a monster movie inspired in part by his 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. According to EW, Army of the Dead takes place in a world where a plague released from Nevada’s Area 51 military base gravely threatens the human race. “The U.S. government has managed to contain the outbreak by building a wall around an overrun Sin City. But there’s still all that cash in zombie-infested casinos, if only somebody is brave (or dumb) enough to try to go and get it.”

“It is a full-blown, balls-to-the-wall zombie heist movie, so it’s genre-on-genre in a great way,” Snyder said. “So you expect pure zombie mayhem, and you get that, 100 percent. But also you get these really amazing characters on a fantastic journey. It’s going to surprise people that there’s a lot of warmth and real emotion with these great characters.”

While Army of the Dead eventually found a home at Netflix, it wasn’t always an easy path to development for the film. Snyder explained that Netflix snagged the project after it spent years at Warner Bros., which “didn’t want to spend that kind of money on a zombie movie, or just didn’t take it that seriously,” he said. It was a fateful meeting with Netflix that brought Army of the Dead to the streaming platform, and Netflix head of original films Scott Stuber jumped at the chance to team up with Snyder. And thanks to Netflix, Snyder was able to dig even deeper into Army of the Dead with an animated prequel series funded by the streamer, which will offer “a super deep dive on where this like zombie plague came from,” Synder said.

When Army of the Dead finally makes its Netflix debut this year, we’ll see Bautista as the lead, who originally turned down the project but signed on after reading the script. “To be quite frank, I wanted to work with Zack,” Bautista said. Joining him onscreen is Notaro, a late addition who was brought on to play the role of a sarcastic helicopter-pilot after the original star, Chris D’Elia, was accused of sexual misconduct this summer.

Notaro was added into the film after much of the scenes had already been shot, so she was forced to perform using a green screen. “We just felt like the right thing to do,” Snyder said of the transition from D’Elia to Notaro. “It was the best thing to do not just for the property but for respecting humanity and people and decency. In the end, it was a pretty easy choice.”

Head to Entertainment Weekly to check out the exclusive first look photos for Army of the Dead.