Posted in: Movies, News | Tagged: the last photograph, zack snyder

Zack Snyder's The Last Photograph Will Start Filming Later This Month

The Last Photograph, another Zack Snyder passion project which has been in varying levels of development since 2011, will start filming later this month.

Another Zack Snyder passion project is about to hit the ground running, but it will be on a much smaller scale than we have seen from the director in the last couple of years. Following Snyder's tenure in the DC Cinematic Universe, he jumped over to Netflix, where he has attempted to launch not one, but two different franchises. Army of the Dead found an audience on Netflix back in 2021, and we got the spin-off Army of Thieves, and while another movie, Planet of the Dead, is supposed to be on the way, there hasn't been any movement. And while all involved made a valiant attempt to make Rebel Moon happen, it doesn't appear anyone is interested in exploring that universe either. So Snyder is scaling back and is finally getting to adapt a project he's been working on, in some capacity, for over a decade. According to The Hollywood Reporter, production for The Last Photograph, a war film, will begin later this month, and he's bringing back Stuart Martin and Fra Fee from Rebel Moon to star.

"The idea of taking camera in hand and simply making a movie in an intimate way is very appealing to me," Snyder said in a statement. "The Last Photograph is a meditation of life and death, embodying some of the trials that I have experienced in my own life and the exploration of those ideas through image making."

Snyder began working on The Last Photograph, though it had a different title, as far back as 2011, but due to many different circumstances, the project couldn't get off the ground. It wasn't until 2023 that Snyder revealed that he had found financial backing for the movie, but it appears they are ready to hit the ground running, and many of Snyder's usual suspects are returning. Deborah Snyder and Wesley Coller will produce via their Stone Quarry banner, along with Gianni Nunnari and his Hollywood Gang Productions company. Snyder reportedly has three composers lined up: Hans Zimmer, Steven Doar, and Omer Benyamin, and the script was written by Kurt Johnstad, who has been working with Snyder since 300.

The story for The Last Photograph that THR was able to share: "An ex-DEA operative must return to the mountains of South America in an effort to find his missing niece and nephew, following the brutal murders of their diplomat parents. Enlisting the help of a washed-up junkie war photographer, the only person to have seen the face of the killers, he sets out, determined to find the children and the truth, but soon learns he must also face the ghosts of his past. Their journey into the unknown takes them further and further away from civilization, bringing into question everything they believe, while slowly eroding the distinction between real and surreal."

THR also reports on how the story has changed in the last decade. The Last Photograph is a war film, and unless you want to make a period piece, which is fine, the geopolitical landscape changes rapidly. It sounds like they aren't going for a period film, and the setting was one of the big things Snyder and his crew needed to address. Initially, "the setting used to be Afghanistan and centered on a war correspondent being the lone survivor of an attack on a group of Americans," which tracks for the early 2010s, but doesn't quite hit the same way now as it would back then. Snyder has worked with budgets north of $25 million since his Dawn of the Dead remake in 2004. We don't know what the budget for this one will be, but going back to the indie roots is never a bad thing for any director.

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