TV
‘Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas’ – Animated Series No Longer Happening at Netflix?
Zack Snyder’s 2021 zombie movie Army of the Dead was supposed to spawn an animated series titled “Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas,” you may recall, but it’s been a while since we’ve heard a peep about that project. In a new interview with Total Film that went up today, Snyder suggests that the planned animated series is no longer moving forward at Netflix.
Additionally, Snyder tells Total Film that “Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas” would’ve revealed that the franchise takes place in the same universe as Snyder’s upcoming Rebel Moon.
“Army of the Dead has a pretty vast mythology that never made it into the movie,” Snyder explains. “There’s actually a character from Rebel Moon in the Army of the Dead animated series that we never did.”
“At one point in the show, they go through a portal into another dimension, and there are characters in that other dimension that they come across,” Snyder continues. “In Rebel Moon, they’re in this bar, and one of the aliens is one of the characters from the animatic. So it’s definitely a shared universe.”
It sounds like Netflix and Snyder got pretty far into the development of “Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas” before the plug was pulled. Snyder explains, “We did all the scripts and the animatics, and all the voices are recorded. So you could watch it, even in its crazy animatic form – you can watch the whole run.”
Army of the Dead spawned the Netflix spinoff movie Army of Thieves in 2021, and the plan was to follow both projects with “Lost Vegas” and the live action sequel Planet of the Dead.
Has Planet of the Dead also been cancelled? Are Netflix and Snyder shifting away from the Army of the Dead Universe and instead focusing on the Rebel Moon Universe, perhaps?
Stay tuned for more as we learn it.
Published in 2019, Stephen King‘s novel The Institute is getting a TV series adaptation from MGM+, with Deadline reporting today that the project has been given a series order.
Ben Barnes (Shadow and Bone) and Mary-Louise Parker (Weeds) will star.
The Institute comes from director/executive producer Jack Bender (Lost, Mr. Mercedes), writer/executive producer Benjamin Cavell (Justified, The Stand) and MGM+ Studios.
In the eight-episode series, “When 12-year-old genius Luke Ellis is kidnapped, he awakens at The Institute, a facility full of children who all got there the same way he did, and who are all possessed of unusual abilities. In a nearby town, haunted former police officer Tim Jamieson (Barnes) has come looking to start a new life, but the peace and quiet won’t last, as his story and Luke’s are destined to collide.” The website notes that Parker will play “Ms. Sigsby, the charming but iron-willed director of the Institute and a true believer in its awful mission.”
“I’m delighted and excited at the prospect of The Institute, with its high-intensity suspense, being filmed as a series,” King said. “The combination of Jack Bender and Ben Cavell guarantees that the results will be terrific.”
“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work again with Stephen King. And The Institute, based on his critically acclaimed novel, is an exciting addition to the MGM+ original series slate,” said Michael Wright, head of MGM+. “There is no creative team I would trust more to bring the book to life than Jack and Ben, whose creative vision and love of Mr. King’s voice, will bring this thought-provoking and gut-wrenching story to life, in the engaging, cinematic, and thrilling style MGM+ viewers expect.”
Here’s the novel’s full synopsis, via Amazon:
As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.
In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.
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