Both of Zack Snyder's “Rebel Moon” films will get their own R-rated director's cut

Don't worry, fans: No campaign is needed this time. Netflix already has planned out "Snyder cuts" for the two-part sci-fi epic.

For years after Zack Snyder departed Justice League in the midst of production, the filmmaker’s most passionate fans repeatedly pleaded their case: #ReleasetheSnyderCut. Eventually, they succeeded. In 2021, Warner Bros. brought the director back to their DC superhero roster one last time to complete Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

That experience taught Snyder and his wife/producing partner Deborah that there is a significant subset of people who will always be interested in seeing his pure, uncut artistic vision. They took that lesson with them as they set out building their own new cinematic universe in the form of the two-part sci-fi epic Rebel Moon (which you can read all about in EW’s new cover story).

Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire hits Netflix on Dec. 22, but that won’t be the only version of the film. At some undisclosed point in the future, a longer R-rated version will be added to the streaming platform, and the same will be true for next year's Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver. But unlike the messy years-long experience with DC, these “director’s cuts” were planned from the beginning. During an hourlong Zoom interview with EW on Halloween about the making of the new films, Snyder said that Netflix producers brought up the idea very early on in the process.

“This was the first time I had ever been able to make a movie and plan for that,” Snyder says. “The cut was not me fighting with them like, ‘Okay, you won't do what I want. Can I at least release it on DVD?’ It was us going together.”

To be clear, Snyder says, “I'm super proud of the PG-13 version, the broader audience version, because I would say it really satisfies an awesome, timeless, mythological scope.” But “what we’ve done with the other version is fun and subversive," he adds, "because an R-rated sci-fi movie at this scale shouldn’t exist.”

So, what will differentiate the director’s cuts from the initial films? Well, for one thing, they’ll be a lot more violent. But they will also further flesh out the new universe Snyder has created — similar to how the beloved “Extended Editions” of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films include additional characters and details about the mythology of Middle-earth.

“It's a full hour longer,” Snyder says. “It's not just slightly different or a little bit more. There are big chunks of the movie that are different.”

Watch EW's full video interview with Zack Snyder on Rebel Moon below.

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Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.