Watchmen Screen Adaptations Timeline

Watchmen's initial 1986 release pleased comic fans seeking cerebral material and producers hunting for a superhero hit. Artist Dave GibbonstoldEntertainment Weeklyproducer Joel Silver (The Matrix,Die Hard) grabbed the property right away. Gibbons said:

I met with Joel Silver. He wanted Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dr. Manhattan: "He’s gonna be Arnie!" We replied, "He has the build, but the German accent..." He said, "Doesn’t matter!" Joel did not move forward with that.

Silver and his partner Lawrence Gordon first wanted Alan Moore to direct the film, but he did not want that.The writer later told theIndependent:

A movie drags you through the scenario at 24 frames per second. A comic book lets you look back at a panel or flip pages. A director cannot fit that much info into a few movie frames.

ThoughWatchmenwriter Alan Moore refused to write the first script. Producers kept asking him for later film versions. Moore never agreed to adapt any of his work for film, stating he works only in comics.He toldEntertainment Weekly:

My book is a comic. Not a movie, not a novel. A comic book. It is made and designed to be read in an armchair, cozy by a fire with hot coffee. I think that makes for a great Saturday night.

Producers moved ahead with their first plans for aWatchmenfilm in the late '80s, and without Moore's approval,they hired Sam Hamm, the screenwriter for Tim Burton'sBatman. Hamm spent a year writing his first draft. He turned the dense 12-issue comic into a 128-page screenplay. This script suggests a two-hour, eight-minute runtime based on the industry's one-minute-per-page rule.

Hamm's script introduced time travel and altered the ending—a recurring theme inWatchmenBy 1991, the project stalled, and Silver and Gordon left the planned distributor.

After the success ofTime Banditsand the Oscar-nominated classicBrazil, director Terry Gilliam got the job to adaptWatchmenfrom Hamm's draft. They changed the script but kept the time travel element. In that story version, Dr. Manhattan would go back to stop Dr. Jon Osterman from being caught in a field subtractor, stopping Dr. Manhattan from ever coming alive.

This action nullified the story's events, making superheroes never exist. Silver liked the idea and said it gave the story a satisfying finish.He explained:

Rorschach, Nite Owl, and Silk Spectre suddenly appear in Times Square. A kid reads a comic book. They start dressing like comic characters instead of being them. The kid reads, "Hey, you're just like in my comic book." This was smart, articulate, and gave a satisfying story ending, but it never happened. Time lost it.

The total failure to get early drafts ofWatchmenThe film attached to several directors. Each played with adapting the comic. They all dropped out for something more doable, or fitting their style. Tim Burton was one such director.

The rumor about Burton's version suggests Johnny Depp would play The Comedian. We do not know the exact time Burton got the directing offer.Watchmen, but the theory suggestshe either turned down the director's jobor quit the project to directSweeney ToddandAlice in Wonderland.

After moving between studios,Watchmenit landed at Universal Studios in 2001. David Hayter, a writer who adapted comics and anime, handled the scripting. He worked on Watchmen.Watchmen,Hayter finished his X-Men screenplay and started Watchmen.X-MenHayter matched the complicated character cast well for the film.

Hayter took about a year to finish his first draft.Alan Moore called the script"as close as I could imagine anyone getting to Watchmen,"Watchmen,and eventually Hayter got attached to direct. After the film left Universal, they removed Hayter from directing, but his script formed the basis for Snyder's later big-screen version.

In 2000, Darren Aronofsky worked with Frank Miller and Warner Bros. on an adaptation ofBatman: Year One. After Aronofsky left, Christopher Nolan took the film and made it the very profitableDark Knight Trilogy. Aronofsky missed one major superhero franchise, so he worked on another.

In 2004, he was officially named the director ofWatchmen. However, an Entertainment Weekly article points out that at the time of the announcement, he was busy with a.Entertainment Weeklyfrom that time points out, he was deep into atroubled production onThe FountainThe Fountain, so it was unclear when he would find time for the film. Aronofsky quit. This left room for other directors to join this messy production.

Paul Greengrass made major changes from the source material when he joined the film.The Bourne Supremacy, Captain Phillips) was attached to the film. He moved the action from the '80s to the modern day, swapping the graphic novel's Vietnam history for an Iraq setting.

The Greengrass version came closest to production among unrealized adaptations. Production designer Dominic Watkins said everything would be more current, referencing the comic's paranoia.He toldCBR:

I thought the political climate from Bush escalated to a similar point. We stood on the brink of something catastrophic, so I thought making a version ofWatchmenMaking it more contemporary and applying it to the '00s was a good idea. It felt more relevant than it ended up being. Zack Snyder's version differed greatly from ours.WatchmenSnyder made the movie page-to-page from the graphic novel. Our version would have used the graphic novel and its characters, but we would have updated it.

One high-profile version that never reached pre-production wasMichael Bay'sWatchmen. Little is known about how long Bay stayed on the project or what he planned. His role in the story fits between his biggest box office failure then,The Island, and his successful launch of theTransformersthe franchise two years later.

Either Bay was still in his "experimental phase" or he sought something to get him back into big box office success. His visuals might have made an interesting take on the film's action. He never directed on the existential results of characters' actions, so his interest inWatchmen was short-lived.

In 2005, Warner Bros. finally decided tohire Zack Snyder asWatchmen's director. At that time, he came from adapting300, and after Alex Tse polished David Hayter's script, everything was ready. Snyder used comic panels as a storyboard. He made creative changes that many viewers disliked.

Snyder added more fight scenes. He removed much of the meta-criticism from the story. He made the film much simpler. HisWatchmenended upcosting about $120 million, which is expensive for that time. Now, that cost is normal for a superhero film.now the normfor a superhero film.

Warner Bros. made a motion comic version of the graphic novel in 2008. This happened nearly a year before Snyder's feature premiered. This move aimed to satisfy fans wanting a true adaptation ofWatchmenWarner Bros. produced a motion comic version of the graphic novel in 2008, nearly a year before Snyder's feature premiered. This 325-minute motion comic plays every frame of the graphic novel, using a voiceover from Tom Stechschulte.

The motion comic splits viewers, just like the feature film. Some fans praise the commitment to the original story and the visuals. Others say they could have just read the comic.some fanspraised the commitment to the original story and effective visualsothers notedthey could have just read the comic.

When Snyder'sWatchmenThe film came out in 2009. It performed okay, but only okay at the box office.It did not become a runaway success.Warner Bros. expected success. The film did not become a financial disaster. It tracked well initially, hitting the year's biggest opening weekend with $55.7 million. The film quickly fizzled, earning only a mere$50 million over budget.Snyder's 'Watchmen' divided fans and critics, and it fizzled at the box office.

Fans felt certain changes to the source material were polarizing. Seeing the film hit theaters was a win, but the final product missed what people wanted.Watchmen.People expected this.Critic Douglas Wolk noted this.:

You can make a movie with the plot ofWatchmen., but it won’t beWatchmen.. You can copy it; you can imitate how Frank Miller drew the comic book.300. ButWatchmenwants to be a comic.

Co-creator Alan Moore threw in his thoughts, even without seeing the movie.::

[Modern cinema] spoon-feeds us. This waters down our shared cultural imagination. We are like newly hatched birds, waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms.Watchmen.The Watchmen film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I am sick of worms.

AfterWatchmenBecause Watchmen failed to draw crowds, director Zack Snyder dismissed the idea of a miniseries. Snyder claimed it did not work better as a series due to television show budget limits at the time, not because he doubted the story.Snyder said:

People often ask if this should be an HBO miniseries or something similar, and he thinks that is cool. But there is no miniseries version of this story that includes a version of Manhattan like the film adaptation. Each shot of him would be your episode's budget.

Watchmen'snew home is on the small screen.. In 2019, Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers) will bring Moore's title to HBO as a "remix" of the original story. This new adaptation looks at the characters today, acting as a sequel to the graphic novel. New and original characters appear, or as Lindelof puts it: "New faces. New masks to cover them."

In announcing the series, Lindelof stated he is not trying to cover ground already covered. His series will tell a completely new story.He explained:

We will not adapt the 12 issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago. Those issues are sacred ground. We will not retread, recreate, reproduce, or reboot them. We will remix them instead. The bass lines in those familiar tracks are too good; we will sample them. This story sets in the world its creators built. This new story must remain original. It must show the seismic unpredictability of its plates. It must ask new questions. It must explore the world through a fresh lens.