When Zack Snyder released his feature length film Watchmen in 2009, many complained that the film didn’t do the book justice, cutting out much of the character development and compressing too much of the story. It’s runtime was already long for an action film at 2 hr 42 min, the two DVD releases were even longer, the Directors cut was 3 hr 6 min and the Ultimate cut was a lengthy
3 hr 35 min.
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The complaints that Watchmen received are pretty standard for adaptations, The Lord of the Rings got them… well pretty much every book adaptation ever made has gotten them. Now with large budget premium cable TV versions of books – we can finally see pretty much every page of our beloved novels, graphic or otherwise on screen.
HBO announced that last month that they would be bringing Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons acclaimed The Watchmen to their network as a TV series. While Zack Snyder was originally attached to the series, he is no longer – now Damon Lindelof of the HBO series The Leftovers is attached.
The artist and co-creator of The Watchmen, Dave Gibbons seems to be hopeful that the TV version will be more fufilling. In an interview with Screen Rant he said, “Yeah. I mean, I think whenever Alan and I in the past had talked about movies and TV, in a way the TV form with an episodic story, which Watchmen very much was. It was a graphic novel. It was a monthly story. I think that works very well.”
You can read the rest of the interview over at ScreenRant.com
Watchmen was first published in 1986 and collected in 1987. Zack Snyder released the feature film incarnation in 2009, to mixed reviews and disappointing domestic box office. It starred Jackie Earle Haley, Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Patrick Wilson.
