The Quarantine Stream: Did You Know Zack Snyder’s First Movie Starred Michael Jordan?
By Ben Pearson/March 22, 2021 7:00 am EST
Snyder has spent the better part of his career depicting larger-than-life heroes on screen: the Spartans in 300, the superheroes of the DCEU, even the owls of Ga’Hoole. But it turns out that throughline goes all the way back to 1990, when he directed the biggest basketball player in the world in Michael Jordan’s Playground. The film is primarily an excuse to showcase Jordan’s incredible highlights (those make up a majority of the runtime), but the framing device novelty had to be directed by someone – and it turns out that someone happens to be one of the biggest and most divisive filmmakers working in Hollywood today. At this point in his career, the only thing Snyder had directed professionally was a single music video for a hair metal band.
