The first trailer for Rebel Moon: The Scargiver quietly dropped on Christmas Day, but even with 1 million views and counting, it's unclear whether Netflix got a valuable gift in the stocking or in the form of a lump of coal.
Rebel Moon is currently the #1 movie on Netflix (with 23.9 million views from its first six days on the platform, according to the now somewhat transparent company). It's also a stain on director Zack Snyder's track record; While not typically a critical darling, the fantasy space opera has garnered some of its own the sourest reviews of his careerfloating between Sucker punch And Justice League (the first attempt) on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator. Is there hope for the Rebel Moon universe?
Netflix must hope so – not only does the streamer have a Rebel Moon follow-up, The Scargiver, locked and loaded for Spring 2024, there is transparent hope for a greater expansion of the universe into other properties. We'll at least get an R rating from the first film, Rebel Moon: A child of fireAnd a four-player co-op Rebel Moon video game from Super Evil Megacorp… eventually.
But while it's hard to imagine a “course correction” for the nascent franchise — it's Snyder's baby through and through — the first trailer for Rebel Moon: The Scargiver could see improvement. A child of fire promised one Seven Samurai-esque team-up film with a climactic battle between underdogs and imperial scum… without actually delivering the climactic battle. Now that the muscle is in place, The Scargiver looks like a third act of the original pitch, broken out into a sequel. If it's all slo-mo action and reference-heavy iconography swirling in a cloud of action, could this be what Snyder envisioned all along? At the very least we're getting a lot more Djimon Hounsou, which is a good sign.
Rebel Moon: The Scargiver will premiere on Netflix on April 19, 2024. And before or after that, we'll get the rated R versions of one or both films, which might be worth holding out for. At the very least, Snyder says they're set in a “different dimension” than the PG-13 films, so that's the case.