Zack Snyder called ‘300’ the gayest movie ever made, pushing back at critics who branded him a fascist after his new film ‘The Last Photograph’ premiered in Toronto on Sunday, 14 September 2026.
The director sat down in Toronto to answer a wave of hostile reviews, as reported by Variety, after online critics called the film racist and misogynistic and pinned the fascist label on him personally.
His answer questioned the incentives behind the pile-on.
Zack Snyder on clicks, fascism and the gayest movie ever made
Snyder’s argument is that outrage travels further than a review. He framed the fascist tag as a piece of content rather than a critique, something built to be shared rather than argued, and then dismissed it flatly.
“Look: Whether you like the movie or not, I’m not even commenting on that; but 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 [expletive] about that. And obviously, I’m not a fascist.”
Why Zack Snyder keeps going back to ‘300’
This is not the first Snyder premiere to curdle into a referendum on the man. He reached straight back for a festival screening almost 20 years ago, where a film that later became a box office monster was written off in the room.
“When we showed ‘300’ at the Berlin Film Festival, this exact same thing happened. There was immediate discourse around the movie, and everyone booed and walked out. They were saying it was a disaster, the worst movie ever, and a fascist movie.”
That was 300 in Berlin in 2007, his adaptation of the Frank Miller comic, which drew the same fascist reading that trails him now and then made a fortune anyway. The interview then took a turn nobody had on the card, when Snyder was asked to pick a political side.
“Are you pro-gay or pro-NRA? Which are you? And I said, Look, I’ll be honest: I’m a tiny bit of both. But obviously I’m pro-gay. I made the gayest movie ever made.”
The NRA is the National Rifle Association, the American gun lobby, which makes that question a piece of culture war shorthand. Pressed on whether he meant the gayest movie line or was being flippant, Snyder doubled down without blinking.
“300 is one of the gayest movies ever made. I always go, Look, there are few movies where people come in straight and come out gay, and 300 is one of them.”
What Zack Snyder does after the gayest movie remark
The Last Photograph does not have a distributor yet, which is the practical problem under all the noise. Next on his slate is a remake of Escape From New York, with a Rick and Morty movie floated and a long-wanted Ayn Rand adaptation further out.
Whether the Toronto reaction sticks is the audience’s call once the film reaches screens, and buyers will be watching how the discourse ages before they bid. The critics who buried 300 in Berlin were outvoted, eventually, by everyone who bought a ticket.
