Zack Snyder will be launching his sci-fi fantasy that Netflix unveils Dec. 22, but the filmmaker is busy developing other projects.

Blood and Ashes began life as a sequel to 300 and 300: Rise of an Empire, and was one of the last projects Snyder worked on before officially leaving Warner after the debacle that was Justice League. But what he turned in was quite different from a 300 sequel.

Blood and Ashes, which he partially wrote while shooting Army of the Dead for Netflix in 2019, focused on the relationship between Alexander the Great and his second in command, Haphaestion.

It was a gay love story that was also an ancient Greek war epic, one that Warners exec Courtenay Valenti liked.

The studio, perhaps unsurprisingly, given its subject matter and the tense circumstances between itself and the filmmaker following his exit from Justice League, ultimately didn’t go for it.

But the project may be back in play, as Snyder recently and producing partner Deborah Snyder, have gotten the rights back from the studio — and are free to shop it elsewhere.

“We got the rights back so we can make if we want it,” Snyder said during an interview for THR cover story. “I don’t know what the marketplace is for an incredibly homoerotic, super violent, super sexual movie. But maybe it’s perfect.”

What is no longer in play, however, is an adaptation of controversial Howard Chaykin comic Black Kiss. Snyder had the rights to the comic, published in the late 1980s, and had taken  stab at adapting it as a TV series, even going as far as writing a pilot.

“No one wanted to make it,” says Snyder. “It was too weird. We really went for it, too.”

Ostensibly a Los Angeles-set hardboiled erotic tale, the story pushed buttons at the time by featuring a transgender femme fatale, skewering religious figures, killing kids, giving readers giant dollops of sex, violence and even some vampires.

Stone Quarry, the banner Snyder runs with Deborah and longtime associate Wesley Coller, has an overall film deal with Netflix, which means the filmmaker will be making original stories for the foreseeable future.

But he did say that there was a possibility that Snyder’s DC movies could end up on the platform.

“Obviously we would like to license it at some point,” Stuber says. “We’d love to have it on so that fans can experience more Zack. The more Zack we have, the better we are.”

There’s the pile of cameras in his memorabilia-cluttered office that he hand-built to shoot Rebel Moon using parts from a Leika camera and vintage 1960s Japanese lenses. They have their own fictional backstory and logos inscribed on them.

Ask him about the Land Rover he’s working on in his driveway and you’ll be spun a tale of the fabled Mount Wilson Toll Road Race, nicknamed Race to the Stars, that unfolded for decades in the mountains above Pasadena, only to be canceled after a fateful accident in 1971. There was no such race, but darn if it doesn’t all sound convincing.