Rebel Moon
A common refrain among both the cast and Zack Snyder himself regarding Rebel Moon has been “We like the PG-13 version, but wait until you see the R-rated director’s cut!”
This month we did in fact get the initial version of Rebel Moon, the two hour Part 1 – A Child of Fire, followed up by Part 2 – The Scargiver, on April 19, 2024, a full four months later. But what Netflix and Snyder have not announced is the R-rated extended cut (which the cast is not supposed to call the “Snyder Cut”) release date, which has fans scratching their heads a bit, given the amount of hype being put behind it. But we can estimate.
The reason, no doubt, that Netflix has not given a release date is because they do not want to decrease the viewership of the first two PG-13 cuts, which they believe to be more family friendly due to a lack of violence, sex and swearing, and there is supposedly a lot of violence, sex and swearing in Snyder’s “real” R-rated cut, which he claims is close to an entirely different movie.
This also makes me believe that there will not be a surprise drop of Part 1’s R-rated cut before Part 2 comes out, some time between now and April, mainly for the same reason. If people watch Part 1’s extended cut and go “oh that was a lot better, well I’ll just wait for Part 2’s extended cut instead,” Netflix doesn’t want that either. They may not even give a release date in the next four months for that reason as well, meaning we may not know until at least April.
Rebel Moon
But after that? My guess is that Netflix will drop the Rebel Moon Snyder Cut over the summer. This is not a situation where some big fan campaign is required to greenlight the new cut, and the movie has to do reshoots and spend a zillion years in editing like what happened with Justice League. That took more than four years to come to fruition, but Netflix actually had Snyder shoot all the extra content for the R-rated cut while he was doing the PG-13 cut. Here’s Snyder on the bizarre process:
“We knew it would be a PG-13 movie. In my heart of hearts, I’d always wanted it to be rated R, but you realize this sort of scale and cost of a movie like this, “Well, it’s not 100% responsible to have that be the demand.” [They were] like, “What if we said do whatever you want over here? Do the PG-13 version and then go nuts [with the other cut]. We don’t care.” That was a thing I’ve never experienced before.”
So that means it can be released in short order after the first two movies are out. The extended cuts are supposed to be three hours instead of two hours, where, violence and sex aside, they should be able to flesh out the world and characters more than the extremely rushed shorter versions, which I would argue was the main problem with Part 1, and I would expect that to continue into Part 2.
I would not expect a Rebel Moon extended cut release until summer. I would probably not even expect a release date announcement until The Scargiver, but I guess we’ll see.
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