Director Zack Snyder has claimed that his space opera Rebel Moon was more popular than last summer’s box office phenomenon, Barbie.
Notably, Rebel Moon is a lifelong passion project from Snyder, with the first instalment arriving on Netflix in December last year. Its release on Netflix came after Snyder spent much of his career making movies under the Warner Bros banner, but he jumped to the streamer with the 2021 feature Army of the Dead.
Rebel Moon boasts an ensemble cast of Sofia Boutella, Charlie Hunnam, Djimon Hounsou, Doona Bae, Ray Fisher, Cleopatra Coleman, Jena Malone, Ed Skrein, and Anthony Hopkins, and more. It follows the story of Boutella’s ex-Imperium solider Kora who takes a stand against her militaristic former employers to defend a peaceful farming colony.
Despite the fanfare, though, the first part of Rebel Moon was critically panned by critics. The negativity was so widespread that Boutella recently hit out at those who “demolished” the project, saying, “I feel like I’m carrying it for everybody that cared so much about this project, and that’s what affected me.”
Regardless of it being critically panned – with Snyder’s director’s cuts also on the way – during his appearance this week on The Joe Rogan Experience, the filmmaker claimed that Rebel Moon was more popular than Greta Gerwig’s 2023 box-office smash Barbie.
“You think about Netflix, for instance, where you push a button,” he said. “Rebel Moon, right? Say right now it’s almost at 90 million views, right? 80 or 90 million accounts turned it on, give or take. They assume two viewers per screening, right? That’s the kind of math.”
The director continued: “So you think if that movie was in the theatre as a distribution model, that’s like 160,000,000 people supposedly watching based on that math. 160,000,000 people at $10 a ticket would be… What is that math? I don’t know. 160,000,000 times ten. That’s 1.6 billion. So more people probably saw Rebel Moon than saw Barbie in the theatre, right?”
“That’s how crazy Netflix is,” Snyder added. “That’s the distribution model that they’ve set up. I was at this thing the other day and we were talking about Rebel Moon Two. And they were like, ‘Well, talk about Rebel Moon the first one.’ I’m like, ‘No, go fucking watch it. I know you have it at your house.’ It’s not like a theatre situation. You could turn it on your phone right now and watch it right here if you wanted. That’s how crazy it is. This model, this machine they’ve built is really something else. It’s really crazy if you think about it.”
The second and final chapter of Snyder’s epic, Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, arrives on Netflix on April 19th.
Watch Zack Snyder on The Joe Rogan Experience below.
