Is Zack Snyder in Directors’ Jail?

Out of the Toronto International Film Festival last week, reviews for Zack Snyder’s The Last Photograph painted a picture of a director in decline. The 300 filmmaker’s long-gestating, independently financed passion project — a Searchers-inspired revenge thriller about an ex-DEA agent looking for his murdered sibling’s kids in South America with the help of a drug-addict photographer — managed to unify reviewers in howling discontent.

IndieWire lamented The Last Photograph’s “callow psychology and interminably dull plotting that no amount of gratuitous, unengaging violence or nudity can overcome.” The Playlist gave credit to the maximalist Snyder for setting his latest in the present-day real world, absent his preferred sci-fi and supernatural trappings — and then proceeded to rip the director a new lens aperture. “Snyder’s talent for image-making is on display, as is his storytelling ineptitude,” the outlet wrote. “The Last Photograph is dead on arrival; it just doesn’t play.”

No director under any circumstance welcomes being sandbagged to a mere 19 percent freshness on the Tomatometer. But for Snyder — who developed The Last Photograph off and on for two decades around his tortured labors on DC’s lugubrious Justice League and through the death of his daughter Autumn in 2017 — such an outcome is particularly calamitous. After scaling the heights of blockbusterdom as Christopher Nolan’s chosen steward to carry Warner Bros.’ post–Dark Knight DC Extended Universe into the future, Snyder stopped playing nice with his longtime studio home, according to insiders. A bruising, ultimately successful campaign to release the “Snyder Cut” of Justice League, which reports indicate had secretly been orchestrated by the director himself as the general of a vast bot army that ratcheted up pressure on Warner Bros., established his reputation as fantasy filmdom’s most divisive auteur. Then, when work on the back lot all but dried up, he retreated to the indulgences of Netflix, directing a pair of the streamer’s biggest-budgeted and most poorly received movies: the PG-13 sci-fi space operas Rebel Moon, Parts One and Two (for both of which he also secured R-rated “completely different” director’s-cut releases).

Viewed in this context, The Last Photograph was supposed to be a reset — a $10 million passion project, for which Snyder served as his own cinematographer, co-written with frequent collaborator Kurt Johnstad. Snyder, who came down with COVID while shooting, once had Sean Penn and Christian Bale attached as stars (Scottish Hugh Jackman doppelgänger Stuart Martin and Irish actor-singer Fra Fee ultimately brought those roles to the screen). Still, it was intended to both bring the filmmaker back to basics and reestablish his cinematic bona fides.

Instead, the opposite seems to have occurred. Arriving at Toronto as an acquisition title, The Last Photograph departed the Great White North this week with no deal in place for theatrical or streaming distribution. “People only get so many shots on goal before you’re like, They’ve either lost their magic or they can’t handle commercial material,” says a veteran former studio executive. “Zack’s stock has gone down. You can’t argue that. Doing something like The Last Photograph was going back to the fundamentals, just make a quality movie. And it’s not landing with audiences or critics.”

I canvassed various industry observers and Hollywood studio and streaming executives to ask whether they thought The Last Photograph has landed Snyder in directors’ jail: an impermanent professional purgatory that has variously been occupied by Josh Trank, Damien Chazelle, Tom Hooper, Marc Forster, and Guy Ritchie, among many others, for such sins as being difficult and directing flops. (Irascible Die Hard director John McTiernan famously served time in both directors’ jail and nonmetaphorical federal prison for lying to FBI agents in 2007.) The consensus on Snyder was mixed. While there was universal agreement that he is unlikely to be handed the reins of a $300 million tentpole title again anytime soon, his track record of success with hits like the 2013 Superman reboot Man of Steel and self-proclaimed “gayest movie ever,” 300 — along with a certain demonstrated fan rapport (aided or not by bot armadas) — has left the cell door ajar. “Zack is not necessarily in directors’ jail,” more than one studio executive told me. “But he is on probation.”

According to Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, there are three types of directors’ jail. “The first kind is you have a flop. There’s not a single major director who hasn’t had one — Nolan and Spielberg included,” Galloway says. “That’s county jail. Then federal lockup is when you do something so morally offensive or heinous that people are afraid to go near you, whatever the price; the studios aren’t just investors, they’re brands, and they have to protect those brands against vast global audiences that are easily offended.” 

“Zack Snyder is not a moral leper,” Galloway continues. “But there’s a third kind of directors’ jail: when hubris and chutzpah lead to a fall, when somebody’s ego and lack of judgment lead to a collapse. When you have flops, the power shifts. This director who’s had three disappointments in a row is the person to invest in? It’s the old thing: Be nice to people while you’re going up because you want them to be there when you’re going back down.” 

By conventional Hollywood wisdom, the best time to hire a talented director can be when they’re coming off a big miss; they have so much more to prove and will often work for cheap. Exhibit A: Gore Verbinski. Through the aughts, his megabudget Pirates of the Caribbean movies ranked among the industry’s biggest global blockbusters, turning crummy theme-park IP into multibillion-dollar-grossing premium cinematic product for Disney and anointing Johnny Depp a superstar in the process. But after Verbinski’s ill-begotten 2013 adaptation of The Lone Ranger died in the saddle at the box office, he was relegated to directors’ jail. Between 2017 and February of this year, he didn’t release a film — but not for lack of trying. Verbinski finally pulled himself out of career oblivion with the gonzo sci-fi action-adventure Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. His first low-budget indie got a raft of positive reviews out of its premiere at Austin’s Fantastic Fest and effectively put the director back on Hollywood’s radar as a for-hire filmmaker.

Snyder, it is worth noting, has been using his Toronto International Film Festival press rounds, ostensibly in support of The Last Photograph, to drum up interest in his planned Escape From New York reboot, detailing Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s interest in the lead role as well as the project’s intended mixture of B-movie kitsch and social commentary.

In Galloway’s view, now that Snyder has level-changed so drastically over his past few films — from studio gigantism, to diminishing returns and reputation on streaming, to indie infamy — the director’s only remaining strategy is to once again prove he can play nice in the Hollywood sandbox. “He’s paraded his ego enough but he’s certainly talented. He has demonstrated enough ability to direct a certain kind of film,” says Galloway. “Now, he has to prove he has the ability to make that kind of film at a much lower budget. And he’ll be back.”