Malin Akerman Calls Zack Snyder’s ‘Watchmen’ a “Big Budget Indie Film”

Speaking with reporters at the world premiere of Rampage earlier this week, Watchmen star Malin Akerman reunited with her on-screen father from that film, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and talked about the legacy of the superhero tentpole-that-wasn’t.

Arguing that the movie was ahead of its time, Akerman argued that the people who “get” Watchmen really enjoy it.

“I actually feel like that was like a big-budget indie film,” Akerman told Variety in the video above. “It’s like a little niche of people who really get it. I almost feel like you have to have read the graphic novel in order to really get the density of it….I think a lot of people thought it was just going to be a superhero film, but its as so much more than that.”

“I don’t know if it’s before its time, or if it’s just familiarity,” Akerman added.

There is an argument to be made that basically any of Zack Snyder‘s films fits the “indie film” description; more then almost any other blockbuster director of his generation, his films are instantly identifiable as his. He has a distinct visual style, and the care with which he crafts shots and scenes from a technical perspective is obvious; that’s part of why all this time later, there are still new Easter eggs being spotted in Batman v Superman all the time.

Watchmen was a fraught production from the beginning; so much of what makes the comic great is how it utilizes the form, often in ways that are not translatable directly to film. Various versions of Watchmen were in and out of development in Hollywood for decades, with more than one producer referring to the project as “unfilmable.”

Eventually, just a few years after filmmakers like Paul Greengrass and Terry Gilliam failed to get the film off the ground, Warner Bros. brought in Snyder, who made a movie that many still believe was his best.

The result was a film that was loyal to the comic in many regards, so much so that some critics accused it of being too slavish to truly work as a movie. Some comic fans, meanwhile, disliked the elements that diverged, particularly the ending.

Watchmen is available in three different versions — the theatrical cut, Snyder’s Director’s Cut, and an “Ultimate Cut” that incorporates the Tales of the Black Freighter animated movie into Snyder’s cut — on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital. You can hear the Emerald City Video Podcast break down the film and some of the differences between the versions below.