General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas

Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas was a planned six-episode animated prequel series to Zack Snyder's 2021 Netflix zombie heist film Army of the Dead, announced by Netflix in September 2020 and canceled before release despite completed scripts, animatics (rough animated storyboards previewing the finished episodes), and voice recordings.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Announced	3 September 2020, alongside the live-action prequel film Army of Thieves¹
Format	Six-episode anime series, described by Snyder as "adult animation"²^•⁴
Premise	The origin story of Scott (Dave Bautista) and his rescue crew during the initial fall of Las Vegas as they confront the mysterious source of the zombie outbreak¹
Key crew	Showrunner Jay Oliva (director of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns), who was to direct two episodes; Snyder also directing two episodes; written by Shay Hatten¹
Voice cast	Dave Bautista, Ana de la Reguera, Tig Notaro, Omari Hardwick, and Ella Purnell reprising film roles, joined by Joe Manganiello, Christian Slater, Vanessa Hudgens, and others⁵
Animation	Meduzarts Animation Studio, part of Montreal's Digital Dimension Entertainment Group⁵
Status	Scrapped; confirmed by Snyder in November 2023 and reported as quietly canceled by The Wrap in mid-2024³^•⁶

Spoilers

Announcement and premise

Netflix announced the series on 3 September 2020 as part of an expansion of the Army of the Dead universe that also included Army of Thieves, a live-action prequel starring and directed by Matthias Schweighöfer. Shay Hatten, one of the screenwriters of the film, was attached to write both projects.¹ According to its official logline, the show was to follow Scott (Dave Bautista) and the crew rescuing him through Vegas's earliest days of collapse while they faced the enigmatic cause of the zombie outbreak.⁵

In a May 2021 interview, producer Deborah Snyder described the series as the first thing developed beyond the film itself, explaining that it would go into the backstory of where the pathogen and the zombies came from, since the film opens six years after the outbreak.⁷ Zack Snyder told Entertainment Tonight that the series would be a direct lead-up to the film's prologue, revealing the origin of the zombie plague in Area 51, how the zombie Zeus became patient zero, and what brought the Las Vengeance team together.⁴

Cast and production

In October 2020 Netflix announced the voice cast. Dave Bautista, Ana de la Reguera, Tig Notaro, Omari Hardwick, and Ella Purnell were set to reprise their film roles. Joining the series were newly announced cast members: Rose would be voiced by Joe Manganiello, Torrance by Christian Slater, Boorman by Harry Lennix, Chen by Ross Butler, Lucilia by Anya Chalotra, Willow by Vanessa Hudgens, Zeta by Jena Malone, Queen Meeru by Yetide Badaki, Nicole by Christina Wren, Meagan by Monica Barbaro, and Clemenson by Nolan North.⁵ Snyder told Entertainment Tonight that Christian Slater would voice the show's villain.⁴

The series was executive produced by Deborah Snyder, Zack Snyder, and Wesley Coller of The Stone Quarry, alongside Jay Oliva and Shay Hatten. Animation was by Meduzarts Animation Studio, part of the Digital Dimension Entertainment Group, a Quebec company based in Montreal that has won six Emmy Awards and four Visual Effects Society Awards.⁵ One person attached to the show described its visual approach as "a unique blend of realistic-style animation with a 2D rendering output."⁸

Netflix's Q2 2021 shareholder letter listed the spinoff anime series among its upcoming slate, scheduled for later in 2022.⁹

Development stall and cancelation

The series never reached release. Netflix's last official mention came through its Geeked profile on 30 November 2021, previewing its 2022 slate. According to crew members' own accounts, work stopped between the end of 2021 and early 2022; Paul Griffin, an animation supervisor on the project through December 2021, wrote that the series "was abandoned partway through."⁸ The timing coincided with a broad restructuring of Netflix Animation by April 2022, in which numerous projects were canceled early in development or midway through.⁸

In March 2023 Snyder said on the podcast The Nerd Queens that there had been "a slight stall on the Lost Vegas animated thing" and that "for technical reasons, it went off the rails a little bit."¹⁰ In a November 2023 Total Film interview he confirmed the series had been scrapped, saying, "We did all the scripts and the animatics, and all the voices are recorded. So you could watch it, even in its crazy animatic form – you can watch the whole run."³ He briefly suggested otherwise on the social platform Vero, replying "No" when a fan asked whether the show was "dead dead,"⁸ but in mid-2024 The Wrap reported, in an interview with Zack and Deborah Snyder, that "the animated series was quietly canceled, along with plans for subsequent films," the film in question being the planned sequel Planet of the Dead.⁶

In late 2024 showrunner Jay Oliva confirmed the cancelation to ScreenRant, saying the team had "completed mostly everything" and was in animation when Netflix pulled the plug, that all pre-production was done, and that he had offered to finish it. He pointed to his later series Infinity: Paradise Lost as an indication of what Lost Vegas would have looked like.⁸ A page for the show that once existed on Netflix with the ID 81153121 now redirects to the homepage.⁸

Shared universe with Rebel Moon

Snyder told Total Film that Lost Vegas would have revealed that Army of the Dead and his then-upcoming Rebel Moon films share the same universe. "There's actually a character from Rebel Moon in the Army of the Dead animated series that we never did," he said, adding that at one point in the show the characters go through a portal into another dimension and encounter characters there, and that one of the aliens in a Rebel Moon bar scene is a character from the Lost Vegas animatic.¹¹

What survives

No episode of the series has been released. Concept art, storyboard lighting concepts, and character designs surfaced in December 2023 when artist Jojo Aguilar uploaded pieces tagged "Dead Army" to his Blogspot profile; before that, the only official image was a still Snyder showed on his phone during a Twitch stream in May 2022.⁸ The Army of the Dead franchise itself lives on outside streaming through a Six Flags themed experience and a VR experience in Las Vegas hosted by Area15.⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026