This (http://comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=12434) little article clued me in that a Watchmen movie is a possibility. Don’t know if this has been discussed here - What do you all think of the idea? (The story is obviously too much for one movie; how would it be divided up?) Who would you cast?
It should be made as a multipart animated miniseries, drawn by (or at least drawn in the style of) Dave Gibbons.
A live-action version would be a disaster that would make LXG look Oscar-worthy.
I don’t like it.
Watchmen: The Movie would be like a novelization of Citizen Kane, or Joyce’s Ulysses as a Broadway musical. Or hell, a comic about Mozart’s The Magic Flute .
That is to say that a significant portion of why the comic works, and why it’s so fondly remembered, is wrapped up in its masterful use of the medium. You can’t turn Gibbons’ wonderful panel compistions or transistions into a movie, or keep Moore’s fantastic prose intermissions. Not to mention the pirate comic…
Yeah, you can adapt the plot and the characters. You might even be able to do a pretty good job at it. But if by the very act of turning it into a film you lose what made the original so celebrated, what’s the point?
First, they refer to it as “The Watchmen”. This really pisses me off. Its fucking watchmen, period. Dr. Manhatten and co. are not part of an organisation called the watchmen, like the x-men. Any movie version will try to tell you that they are. That is why any movie version of Watchmen is going to suck. This story cannot be told in any other medium. Why are people trying.
They’ve been talking about a movie for years. It’ll never happen.
Far too long for a single film anyway. Possibly a miniseries.
My fanboy wet dream is to a see a mini series of 12 one-hour animated episodes on HBO (or 24 Half Hour episodes).
HBO could easily do it. Not only is a TW Company, it also could make a TON from the inevitable DVD sales alone.
I don’t believe it could be done successfully now; it’s two decades out of date. The whole story is framed by the Cold War and the imminent threat of nuclear armageddon. The cast consists of a group of disillusioned Baby Boomers, a Vietnam war criminal, and a living ICBM, with a cameo appearance by special guest star President-for-Life Richard Nixon. While it may still be possible to create a successfully tense Cold War drama in these post-Cold War times, I think a Cold War drama about superheroes is probably asking the audience to accept one gimme too many. Also, I somehow doubt that the original story, in which a deadly terrorist attack on New York saves the world from destruction, would fly nowadays.
Nonsense. This is Alan Moore, not Grant Morrison.
The story can be told quite well in any medium. Different techniques would have to be used at some points, to achieve the same effect, but the story isn’t intrinsically linked to the medium, as, say, Morrison’s Animal Man was.
Why not? Saving Private Ryan rivited audiences and we ALL knew how it was going to end.
Private Ryan wasn’t rescued by Captain America, though. That’s what I meant by ‘one gimme too many.’
I would think it terribly difficult to pull off as a single movie. There is simply too much to the story to get it all in to 3 hours without losing key parts.
Getting it right as a live action film would be terribly, terribly hard, I think. In addition to the length of the story, I think that the characters would not transfer well to film.
I think it could be done well animated in half-hour episodes, each corresponding to an issue of the comic. There is a definite cinematic feeling to the framing of many of the panels, which would help. The series format would also give the opportunity to present the additional material that helped to make the original comic series so effective – background on the original heroes shed a lot of light on the story in the foreground.
I don’t think it would work. Pretty much for reasons that have already been mentioned. Watchmen was a comic book about comic books in the same way that Pulp Fiction was a movie about movies; the real depth didn’t come from the surface story, it came from the self-referential nature of the series - and all that would be lost in a movie. And the surface story itself was set in the Cold War - which is now history. You can talk about history and you can enjoy history and oftentimes you don’t really understand the events happening around you until they become history but one thing you can’t do is go back and relive history.
Alan Moore is stinky with DC (more to the point, Warner Bros) over V for Vendetta, and has hulled that movie in pre-production by correcting comments that he endorsed the movie (he did not). Methinks WB would think twice before initiating a Watchmen movie.
There’ve probably been less than 75 threads about it.
Probably.
Horrible idea, anyway. I like what someone said about 12 1-hour (or 24 half-hour) animated episodes, but anything live-action, especially made for the big-screen, would be an absolute disaster. It would turn people off to comic books for life.
If something called Watchmen were released as a 2-hour movie, about the only thing it would share with the series would be the name.
I have stated in previous threads (and there have been many) that if it were to be made a movie, that it be the first release of a Pixar studio spin-off imprint that focused on more mature films (no, not “adult” but Computer-animated while clearly not for kids or “the whole family,” just grown-ups). Maybe break it up into a 6-hour film, total or something.
Man, Brad Bird (Iron Giant, the Incredibles) would do a wonderful job.
sigh but it’ll never happen…
I’d like to see Watchmen: The Musical.
There was talk for a while (or perhaps just rumors) of a Sandman musical, with Neil Gaiman collaborating with Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, one of the best songwriters in popular music today.
That would so not work if it followed the plot. As a Cirque de Soleil riff, however, it has the potential to be moody and spectacular.