Zack Snyder joined Anthony and Joe Russo’s “Pizza Film School” podcast and raved about HBO’s “Euphoria” and Netflix’s “Squid Game,” two shows he cited while discussing how television has become far more adventurous and exciting than film when it comes to storytelling.
“I think we’re in a real golden age of TV in the sense that TV shows are much better at showing you something that you’ve never seen before or catching you off balance or making a turn that you didn’t see coming,” Snyder said (via The Playlist). “They’re way riskier.”
“‘Euphoria,’ for instance, I was just watching the show [and] it’s just unbelievable,” Snyder continued. “That show shouldn’t exist; it’s so good. And that’s the kind of thing…I watch that show and go, ‘This movie would never get made; this movie can’t exist.’”
Joe Russo agreed, saying all the pressures placed on box office and more that exist for movies in Hollywood would take out all the risk in a “Euphoria” movie.
“You could imagine ‘Squid Games’ coming here as a movie, it would be an arthouse [thing], maybe,” Snyder continued. “‘Euphoria’ and ‘Squid Game’ take you to places where you have no idea where you are going or what’s happening, and I think that’s what people want.”
Russo picked up Snyder’s thread and agreed, adding, “Why I think you’re saying TV is now in a golden age is that it is disrupting from a format standpoint. It’s ten hours of content; it’s eight hours of content. You get a different emotional impact killing a character five hours into a ten-hour story because you’ve spent five hours with that character versus an hour. It’s just different. You’ve assigned more of your time, you have more investment, and when that character goes, you feel it because of that investment.”
The Russo Brothers are best known for helming Marvel movies such as “Avengers: Endgame,” but they’re now embracing television storytelling with their upcoming Amazon Prime Video spy series “Citadel.” Snyder, meanwhile, is somewhat embracing longer-form storytelling with his Netflix space opera “Rebel Moon,” which the streamer allowed the director to break up into two films.
“Rebel Moon” is scheduled to be released on December 22, 2023, while “Rebel Moon Part 2” will most likely arrive in 2024.
