Filmmaker Zack Snyder has been a very busy man. After finally getting his version of “Justice League” on HBO Max, he now has a new action film ready for yet another streaming venue: Netflix. Furthermore, it is a thematic follow-up of sorts to his 2004 remake of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” zombie movie. And where the general gist of most zombie apocalypse stories is to survive and find refuge at any cost, this new misadventure, as told by Snyder, will see the cast deliberately enter a zombie zone, and doing so for less than altruistic reasons as well.

According to Comic Book Resources, the first trailer for Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead” has just come out, promising some high-octane zombie survival action on Netflix with a cast led by Dave Bautista. At first glance the trailer seems to take the central zombie outbreak down some notches to a limited scale, with Las Vegas being ground zero and cordoned off from the outside world. With the primary setting being Vegas however, Snyder has mixed in a separate action genre to the zombie film to give it an unexpected twist for audiences: a heist.

The trailer sees Bautista’s character, Scott Ward, working at a highway deli when approached by a strange gentleman (Hiroyuki Sanada) with a proposition: infiltrate the zombie-plagued city of Vegas to steal money from a vault under the famous Strip. Scott, a disillusioned military veteran implied to have seen action in the initial Vegas outbreak, agrees to the job and assembles a team. They have 32 hours to pull the heist and escape before the military apparently plans to glass Vegas. But their operation is complicated when they encounter the zombies contained in the city. Despite being driven by the need to feed, they are capable of communicating between themselves, and seemingly organized under actual leadership.

Other members of the cast include Garret Dillahunt, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Raul Castillo, Tig Notaro, Theo Rossi and Ana de la Reguera. “Army of the Dead” has apparently been in the works since 2007 (three years after Zack Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” remake premiered). The director of “300” and “Man of Steel” is confident in the dynamic mixing of pulling a vault job in the middle of a zombie horde, saying in January, “It is a full-blown, balls-to-the-wall zombie heist movie, so it’s genre-on-genre in a great way.”

“Army of the Dead” will premiere on Netflix streaming on May 21. Two prequel productions, another movie (German-American co-production) called “Army of Thieves,” and an anime-style series subtitled “Lost Vegas,” are both in development for later release also on Netflix.

Image courtesy of Screen Rant