Watchmen: Chapter One Director Hopes to Adapt Doomsday Clock, Other Watchmen Spin-Offs

The world of Watchmen will soon be brought to life in a new medium, with the first of a two-part animated movie adaptation arriving this week. Beyond Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original text in the 1985 miniseries, Watchmen has grown into a bit of a franchise, earning the recent comic sequel series Doomsday Clock, as well as an award-winning Watchmen television show in 2019. While speaking to ComicBook about his work on Watchmen: Chapter 1, director Brandon Vietti threw his hat into the ring for the film’s team to potentially adapt Doomsday Clock, or potentially any of the Before Watchmen spinoff miniseries from the 2000s.

“I’m game for it,” Vietti revealed in our interview, which you can check out above. “I’m a big DC fan. So, yeah, I’d be game for doing something like that. It would be great, because we’ve already built so many of the designs, we’ve built this world, and Dave Gibbons’ art was such an inspiration for us in building this world. It’s always sad for us, as the artists, to have done all this work, to build this amazing world, especially everything that Dave Gibbons designed, and then just walk away from it and never go back. So, yeah, a lot of us, I think Doomsday Clock was on our mind. There’s been some other spinoffs from Watchmen. We would love to, if Warner Brothers is game for it, then I think anybody on the art team would sign up immediately because we had a blast translating this book.”

What Is the Watchmen Animated Movie About?

In Watchmen: Chapter 1, in an alternate world history set in 1985, the murder of a government sponsored superhero draws his outlawed colleagues out of retirement and into a mystery that threatens to upend their personal lives and the world itself.

The cast of the Watchmen animated movie includes Titus Welliver as Rorschach, Matthew Rhys as Nite Owl, Katee Sackhoff as Silk Spectre, Michael Cerveris as Doctor Manhattan, and Troy Baker as Ozymandias.

Will Watchmen Get a Season 2?

The Watchmen movie marks the latest attempt to adapt the events of the maxiseries, following Zack Snyder’s 2009 movie, and later HBO’s award-winning television series in 2019. According to previous comments from HBO executive Casey Bloys, there are no current plans to continue the Watchmen series in any way, and it would ultimately be up to series creator Damon Lindelof to return to the project.

“Watchmen was so much his creation,” Bloys previously told Variety. “If he doesn’t think there’s a story that he wants to put his heart and soul into, it’s hard for me to think that it would be worth doing. It was a very special limited series for us. I would put it in the pantheon of HBO greats. If Damon ever wants to revisit it, he knows that it’s an open door. But it is hard for me to imagine doing one without him.”

Watchmen: Chapter 1 is available exclusively on Digital on August 13. 4K UHD and Blu-ray arriving on August 27. Watchmen: Chapter 2 is set to debut later in 2024.