Zack Snyder has made cameo appearances in the majority of his movies to date, although he’s hardly an M. Night Shyamalan type who gives himself lengthy speaking roles. The filmmaker tends to hide in plain sight, typically as a member of military personnel, dating right back to his feature debut in the Dawn of the Dead remake.
In his 2004 zombie effort, he can be seen gunning down the undead outside the White House, while he briefly appears alongside Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Comedian during Watchmen‘s Vietnam flashback, and in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice he voiced a henchman. Eagle-eyed fans even spotted him in the background of Wonder Woman‘s grainy photograph showing Diana Prince and her team, and he was hiding in plain sight as a coffee shop patron in HBO Max’s Justice League.
Snyder continues the trend in Army of the Dead, but it’s completely accidental in nature this time around, although he’s fully aware of the goof but decided to keep it in the Netflix smash hit anyway. During the opening credits, a bunch of zombie strippers chase a man wearing a toupee down a hallway, and somehow viewers managed to spot the director in two frames of footage where he’s seen operating a camera via the reflection in a mirror about nine minutes in.
He teased his blink and you’ll miss it onscreen contributions on social media and in interviews, which led to his dedicated supporters combing through Army of the Dead in an effort to find him. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long, but at least it’s not an oversight on his part when he knew he was there and just opted to leave the shot as it was.