Justice League director Zack Snyder's next film to be about individualism vs collectivism in the world of architecture

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Zack Snyder's career has been spent almost entirely in the world of superheroes, the filmmaker having directed Justice League, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Man of Steel and Watchmen, produced several other DC movies and broken through with the similarly action-orientated 300.

His next project, which he confirmed in response to a fan on Vero (detailed in a tweet below), may come as a surprise then: an adaptation of Ayn Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead.

The book centres on protagonist Howard Roark, an individualistic young architect who dreams up modernist buildings and refuses to compromise with an architectural establishment opposed to innovation.

Rand once identified the central theme of her novel as "individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but within a man's soul".

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A change of genre makes sense for the director after Batman v Superman and Justice League were both met with a mixed response from fans and critics (to put it kindly), but why such a major departure?

The answer may lie in the book's ideology.

The Fountainhead has remained popular with right-leaning libertarians thanks to its message of the importance of the self and of independence, which marries somewhat with the solo vigilante narratives of superhero movies and the outlook of Snyder's characters.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who made Oscar-winning satire Birdman, once mused that superhero films sometimes "purport to be profound, based on some Greek mythological kind of thing. And they are honestly very right wing.

"I always see them as killing people because they do not believe in what you believe, or they are not being who you want them to be," he continued.