The new trailer for Netflix's Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead zombie universe for the streamer, Army of Thieves focuses on Matthias Schweighöfer's safecracker Dieter Ludwig ing a planned heist organized by Nathalie Emmanuel's Gwendoline. Schweighöfer also directed the film, with the first full trailer dropping during Netflix's TUDUM event for the streaming platform's many movies and TV series.
Army of the Dead got the franchise rolling back in May of this year. It followed a team of mercenaries hired to carry out a heist in Las Vegas after the city had been sealed off in the aftermath of being overrun by zombies. The movie introduced a new, more intelligent zombie breed known as Alphas, and with Army of the Dead 2 greenlit and the animated prequel series shed more light on Army of the Dead's zombie origins, the dearth of the undead on the Army of Thieves trailer might seem a little odd at face value. However, it all has to do with Army of Thieves' place in the universe's timeline and the more contained zombie horde of its predecessor.
Army of the Dead's opening prologue showed the chaos of zombies overrunning Las Vegas. The movie's main story took place six years later, with its intro sequence seeming to unfold during the same approximate timeframe of Army of Thieves, as indicated by flashes of news coverage of the outbreak and Gwendoline explaining to Dieter that "the world's distracted" in planning their heist. Apart from that, the rise of Army of the Dead, even with an alien connection, wasn't as apocalyptic as is usually the case for most zombie movies.
Despite the efforts of the U.S. military and the Las Vengeance mercenaries, the zombies in Army of the Dead's opening were able to multiply too fast for the plague to be stopped. This forced the U.S. government to seal the city off to keep the zombies from spreading out into the world. With Army of the Dead's zombie apocalypse effectively localized to Las Vegas, this explains the zombies being mostly absent from the Army of Thieves trailer, not to mention the fact that it still wasn't necessarily at the height of the zombie outbreak yet.
To be sure, the Army of the Dead franchise, but Army of Thieves is devoting itself to the heist side of the first movie's equation. Thanks to its prequel status and the Alpha army growing without spreading beyond Las Vegas, it can do just that with no difficulty.
