Between “Dawn of the Dead,” “Watchmen,” and “Justice League,” you might think that Zack Snyder really, really loves getting groups of characters together. But in a recent Total Film interview, he admitted that it’s more of a love-hate relationship. “I’m not a huge fan of ensemble films, and yet I do it every time!” the filmmaker lamented. “There’s something wrong with me where I’m like, ‘I have to get a team together, and get them to do a thing!’ I’m like, ‘Goddammit. Why? Every f***ing time, I’ve got to put a team together.'”
And sure enough, “A Child of Fire” is a putting-a-team-together movie, which will conclude (presumably) with the assembled team kicking ass in the second half of the story, “The Scargiver.” The two films were shot back-to-back and will release just a few months apart. Co-writer Kurt Johnstad told Total Film that while the two-part structure did originate from the problem of the script simply being too long (“At one point, the ‘one movie’ was 200-plus pages!”), this isn’t just a really long interval for one very long movie.
“It was decided the story would be split over two films in order to preserve crucial character and mythology detail, but no one wanted it to feel like a single movie with a cliffhanger crowbarred into the middle,” said Johnstad. His co-writer Shay Hatten backed this, saying, “We worked to divide them to make sure they each felt like their own proper experience. So it is one macro story being told, but they both have their own flavor.”
Sci-fi fans can judge for themselves when “Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire” hits Netflix on December 22, 2023, followed by “Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver” on April 19, 2024.
