Watchmen Chapter 1: J. Michael Straczynski Wrote Script for Animated Adaptation

Fan-favorite comics and TV writer J. Michael Straczynski will provide the screenplay for Warner Bros. Animation’s forthcoming adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal comic book Watchmen. The two-part, animated movie aims to be the most direct adaptation to date (if you ignore the motion comics that actually did get a DVD release in 2009). Addressing the movie’s just-released trailer on social media, the Babylon 5 creator warned fans not to watch out for any of his signature touches, as he did his best to basically translate the comic into a format that worked for animation.

Per Straczynski, he actually insisted on an “adapted by” credit for the movie, rather than the standard “written by.” There’s no word on whether Moore and Gibbons will get an onscreen credit; when a Watchmen sequel was brought to the small screen in 2019, Moore asked that his name be left off it.

“I can now talk about it as the news is breaking. I adapted Watchmen for Warners animation,” Straczynski said on social media. “By ‘adapted’ I mean strictly configuring the structure to work in a movie. I saw no need to write more material or change what works in the book. It’s pure Moore.”

Straczynski has already written more material featuring these characters; he wrote three of the Before Watchmen miniseries that were released in 2012. At the time, he was defiant when presented with criticism of the project.

“I think that Alan loses the moral high ground when you look at the last ten, fifteen years of his career, and he’s working with other people’s characters–in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls, on and on–almost creating slash fan fiction,” Straczynski told me in 2012. “That’s kind of the cowardly way to look at it. At least we’re doing this while Alan is still alive and he can have a voice.”  

On X, Straczynski also seemingly took a shot at Zack Snyder’s live-action Watchmen movie, which removed the Tales of the Black Freighter sequence from the film, but released it as a stand-alone animated movie. Tales of the Black Freighter was a comic book within the universe of the Watchmen narrative, and readers experienced it along with a young reader at a newsstand. While it was a story-within-a-story, it interacts narratively with what’s happening in Watchmen, and its removal from the theatrical film was one of the common criticisms by comic book fans.

“That material isn’t expendable, as it reflects, comments upon and counterpoints what’s going on in the present storyline,” Straczynski said. “Treating it like something apart means one doesn’t actually understand what it’s there for.”

Of course, the Ultimate Cut of Snyder’s Watchmen restored the Black Freighter material, so maybe we’re overthinking what Straczynski was trying to say there.

Here’s how WB describes the animated movie: “In an alternate world, the murder of a government sponsored superhero draws his outlawed colleagues out of retirement, into a mystery that threatens their lives and the world itself.”

Watchmen Chapter 1 will be available digitally on August 13.