Zack Snyder Says the ‘Last Photograph' Negative Reviews Were “100%” About Him and Not the Movie

Zack Snyder woke up in Toronto the morning after his premiere and did the one thing no filmmaker should ever do the morning after: he opened X.

"This morning, I woke up to my X feed, and the discourse is incredibly energized by this battle," he tells Variety. "It's like there's a war going on — instantly."

Reviews from critics have been terrible. The film currently sits at 16 on Metacritic and 18% on Rotten Tomatoes .. Look, I haven’t seen the film, but been reporting on this movie for months, and everything I heard got confirmed in that room Sunday night. Snyder financed "The Last Photograph" himself, shot it in Colombia in October 2025 with his "Rebel Moon" leads Stuart Martin and Fra Fee, on a budget of around $10M. He shot it. He pitched it as his "Apocalypse Now." No studio has dared touch it yet. That's why it ended up at TIFF at all.

The reactions were a bloodbath. All the negative hyperbole you can imagine. Snyder’s read on it is that none of this was ever about the movie, and “100%” due to “preexisting feelings” people already had of him.

There were only 1,200 people in the theater and there are thousands of comments! There was one I was reading where it was a guy who clipped it and said, 'I haven't seen it yet but I'm sure it was horrible.

Snyder then starts reading off the hate tweets:

I want to kill Zack Snyder.' 'Zack Snyder is a fascist.' 'Zack Snyder is a homophobe.' 'Zack Snyder is a bisexual.'" The bisexual one, apparently, because the two leads spend most of 135 minutes shirtless. "I guess! It's 'homoerotic' and 'transphobic' and 'fascist' and all these things.

He’s particularly irked about the misogyny charge — the most substantive thing coming out of the premiere — and is confused by the allegations:

First of all, I would argue that the violence toward women and men is equal and that nobody is spared — men, women, children, everybody. The justice that's doled out in the movie is in the same way that a hurricane doles out justice.

Take that how you will. He's also, to his credit, entirely clear-eyed about why the discourse works the way it does. "With me, it's more clickable to say, 'I hate Zack Snyder! He's a fascist!' than it is to say, 'I saw the movie and it was cool.' Nobody gives a fuck about that." And then, flatly: "Obviously, I'm not a fascist."

That said, the discourse war is obscuring what's actually on Snyder's mind — and the only part that actually matters to his business, despite it never coming up in the interview: the film went into Toronto as an acquisition title with CAA handling international, and no deal has been announced. The only real sale out of this festival so far is "River" to Universal and Blumhouse, north of $10M, and titles like "Bucking Fastard," "Alpha Gang" ‘Wilson Shedd,’ and "Closing Night" are still sitting there unsold alongside it.

Snyder screened it in Toronto because nobody would buy it in a room. Now its reputation has been gutted in public. So who takes it on? At this point, certainly none of the major studios, and you can forget about A24, Neon and Mubi. That leaves Vertical, Ketchup, Briarcliff and company — distributors with a reputation for saving problematic movies.