Inside the year’s most unlikely spin-off
How a minor character became the star for surprise Army Of The Dead prequel ARMY OF THIEVES
WHEN ZACK SNYDER first pitched Army Of The Dead to Netflix, he didn’t just pitch one movie. He didn’t just pitch a franchise. He pitched a cinematic universe, with sequels and animated spin-offs and prequels galore, filling in the blanks of his zombie apocalypse. Of course, for every Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s a Dark Universe, the Universal attempt to revive their iconic monsters which was staked through the heart before it could even get off the slab.
But nobody expected Army Of Thieves, an origin story about Army Of The Dead’s German safecracker, Ludwig Dieter. It’s December 2020 when Empire is magically transported to Prague (via a mobile phone being carted around by producer Misha Bukowski), a full five months before Army Of The Dead will even hit Netflix, and such is Netflix’s confidence in the property that they greenlit a spin-off centred around a character that audiences had not even seen. And, just to double down on the boldness of this move, Matthias Schweighöfer, the actor who plays Dieter, isn’t just on set today to deliver lines and hit his marks: he’s directing the thing.
“It was such a fantastic surprise,” says
Schweighöfer, who has directed a number of German movies, such as What A Man and The Manny. “I was super, super honoured. To have my own prequel for that character was really surprising. And then here we are, shooting day 41.”
There’s not a lot of shooting, of the boomstick variety, going on today. Instead, Schweighöfer is marshalling a multi-character dialogue scene in the back of a van. But that’s also symptomatic of the approach to Army Of Thieves, which won’t try to replicate the bombastic, over-the-top zombie slaughterfest of its parent movie. “I’m constantly talking to Zack,” says Schweighöfer. (As well as co-writing the story, Snyder serves as a producer.) “‘Okay, what could be different to Army? What is the same?’ It is part of the universe, but a totally different movie. It’s an adventurous heist movie.”
It will, once again, see Dieter recruited for his ability to prise open a particularly tricky safe, but it’s going to be a much more conventional heist movie, based in Europe, and set in the years before Dieter winds up in America. So, somewhat unconventionally for a zombie movie spin-off, don’t expect ghouls. “There’s not really any zombies,” says Nathalie Emmanuel, who plays Gwendoline, the leader of the motley crew with whom Dieter finds himself aligned. “We see that it’s happening somewhere else, but it’s relevant because it’s this impending potential danger for the whole world.”
Eagle-eyed viewers will have spotted that, when we meet Dieter in Army Of The Dead (which has since hit Netflix’s all-time top ten), he’s working at a company called Gwendoline. So Army Of Thieves adds another layer of complexity into the mix, as the sweet-natured safecracker might just find that Gwendoline is about to make off with his heart, mid-heist. “Of course, he sees her and is head over heels,” laughs Bukowski. “They bond over cracking these specific safes, which each have a certain mythology wrapped around them. He’s never met anyone who has had a passion for safecracking, until he met her.”
Netflix is hoping that audiences share that passion. Time will tell if its big cinematic universe gamble pays off. But as the film’s own poster tagline acknowledges… nothing is a safe bet.