Override autozoom

I normally use autozoom on my nodes and it works great. But now I need to provide my own zoom level. Whenever I add my zoom level to the $element variable for theme_gmap() it just gets ignored. If I turn off the gmap autozoom behavior setting my zoom level works. So I need to be able to switch off the autozoom from where my module calls theme('gmap', $my_map_data).

How can I accomplish this? Is it possible. My first thought was to override theme_gmap, but I want this to be contained within a module and not spread into the template.

Thanks.