As we’ve seen in the not too distant past with The Mandalorian‘s breakout star Jeans Guy, fans love spotting mistakes and goofs in high profile productions, and the unfortunate crew member discovered in the back of season 2 quickly became a short-lived internet phenomenon, even getting his own character poster for good measure.
Zack Snyder was recently seen lurking in the background of Netflix’s Army of the Dead, but unlike the cameos he typically makes in his own movies where he’s playing some sort of thug, solider, henchman or coffee shop patron, this one was completely accidental. It was as innocuous as a single frame during the opening credits where you can see him reflected in a mirror operating a camera, and in a new interview, the filmmaker admitted that he was completely aware of his guest spot but decided to keep it in the movie anyway.
“Yeah, if you look, there’s a mirror that the QC, you know we do this quality check, we watch the movie hundreds of times to look for like some weird little mistakes and stuff. I got a call and they’re like, ‘Oh, we found you in this one shot’, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right’, because I remembered it. They were like, ‘Do you want us to erase it?’. And I was like, ‘Oh no, leave it, it’s fine’. You know, it’s like, nobody will notice it.”
If Snyder can twist Netflix’s arm into giving him millions of additional dollars to shoot a series of brand new scenes with Tig Notaro and composite her into Army of the Dead in post-production, then you’d imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult for the effects team to erase him from something as innocuous as a solitary shot, but he didn’t really see the point.
Saying that nobody would notice may have been an oversight, though, given that people love to spot these kinds of things, as we saw when Eternals was trending after fans were convinced the cameraman seen in the first bit of footage wasn’t supposed to be there. In any case, at the end of the day, Army of the Dead is a blockbuster that runs for two and a half hours, so a single frame of accidental Snyder can be easily forgiven.