Re: [Movie] The Watchmen

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I always thought Sucker Punch could have been a cool movie if Carpenter or Gilliam had made it in about 1985. Would have been fun to see with those minds banging out the story, and practical effects. As it is, it's a mess of a concept that just looks like video game cut scenes.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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/film wrote:Report: Zack Snyder and HBO Discussing ‘Watchmen’ TV Series

UPDATE: HBO has confirmed to Deadline that “preliminary discussions regarding Watchmen have occurred,” but stresses that no deals are in place.

Director Zack Snyder may be returning to the world of the Watchmen, this time on a smaller scale. According to a new report, the filmmaker has been in meetings with HBO about the possibility of a Watchmen TV series. Read about the possible Watchmen TV series after the jump.

Collider got the scoop on the Watchmen TV series. Their sources have said only that conversations about the show have taken place. Nothing has officially been confirmed or greenlit, and as the site points out HBO is somewhat unpredictable when it comes to launching new series. In other words, there’s a decent chance the Watchmen TV series will never actually get off the ground.

Update: Variety confirms that very early talks are taking place between HBO, Warner Bros., and Zack Snyder. A spokesperson for HBO said, “Preliminary discussions regarding ‘Watchmen’ have occurred but we have no additional information and no deals are in place.”

First published in the 1980s, Alan Moore‘s Watchmen is one of the most influential and acclaimed comic book series of all time. Naturally, Hollywood tried for decades to get a movie adaptation off the ground, in various iterations with various artists, but no one succeeded until Snyder made his feature version in 2009.

His film was met with mixed reactions. Some fans found it slavishly faithful to the source material, while others complained about the changes he’d made. Still others were enamored with Snyder’s darkly stylish vision, and impressed at his handling of a supposedly “unfilmable” storyline. In any case, it flopped commercially. Watchmen earned $185 million worldwide on a budget of $130 million.

As of now it’s not clear what kind of Watchmen TV series HBO and Snyder have in mind. It could be a direct adaptation of Moore’s graphic novel. The polarized reactions to the movie may suggest there’s still room for another, more universally liked Watchmen adaptation. Or perhaps HBO is considering a spinoff of some kind, or a prequel or a sequel.

It’s worth pointing out that there’s fresh, related source material they could draw from. In 2012 DC published a series of comic book prequels. Collectively called Before Watchmen, the series consisted of eight limited series, each focused around a specific character, plus a one-shot for a total of 37 issues.

Also unknown is in what capacity Snyder will be involved — whether he’ll adapt, write, direct, some combination of the above, or none of the above. Nor do we know whether it could tie into Snyder’s 2009 film. It does seem unlikely to cross over with the either the big-screen DC universe, which is being shepherded by Snyder, or any of the various small-screen DC universes.

In a lot of ways, a Watchmen HBO series makes sense. The property’s prestigious reputation and grown-up sensibility make it a good fit for HBO’s brand, especially if the network is looking for a genre hit to replace Game of Thrones, and superhero shows are hot right now. Plus, not for nothing, HBO and DC Comics are owned by the same parent company (Time Warner).

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io9 wrote:An R-Rated Watchmen Movie Could Be Coming Soon, According to a Leaked Warner Bros. Survey

A live-action film adaptation of Watchmen hit screens in 2009. Eight years later, it seems very likely that an animated version of the classic superhero story is on its way.

A report on CBR contains an image from a survey hosted on Warner Brothers A-List, a community site run by the movie studio. It makes reference to an upcoming Watchmen movie.
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Text in the survey image says that the movie will be “executed in an animation style that mirrors the source material” and notes an anticipated R-rating for the project. The information in the image was also cited in a tip about the survey sent to io9.

Originally released in 1986, Watchmen was written and drawn by legendary creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, with colors by John Higgins. With literary sensibility and psychological complexity, it went on to become regarded as a classic in the superhero genre. The beloved work has also become a perennial cash cow for DC Comics and parent company Warner Bros., never going out of print and spawning multiple editions, video games, motion comics, and controversial Before Watchmen prequels.

The Watchmen movie directed by Zack Snyder left a lot of people cold, so this animated iteration might receive a warmer reception in some circles. It’ll be interesting to see if this project sticks solely to the original work produced by Moore and Gibbons or if it incorporates elements from any of the Before Watchmen series. We’ve reached out to Warner Bros. for comment and will update this post if the studio responds.
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Re: [Movie] The Watchmen

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DH wrote:Lindelof Isn’t Yet Set For HBO’s “Watchmen”

Writer/producer Damon Lindelof may have scored critical acclaim for the final two seasons of “The Leftovers” on HBO, but the underseen show isn’t what most people associate with him – they’re still arguing and mad over his work on “Lost,” “Prometheus” and “Star Trek Into Darkness”.

So when it was reported the other week that he potentially will have a hand in developing an HBO series adaptation of Alan Moore’s iconic graphic novel “Watchmen,” there was an understandable whirlwind of reaction.

In a new interview with TV Line, Lindelof suggests that nothing is official yet: “As of right now, I haven’t had any meetings with HBO about Watchmen.” He does, however, acknowledge that the network has approached in some form:

“I’ve been very vocal about my love for those twelve issues…that they were completely and totally inspiring for all the storytelling that I did subsequently, and that I owe a debt to it. I do feel like I have to weigh the balance of ‘should it exist’ before I decide to take it on, and I’m sort of in that process now. I hold the source material in such high regard, it would literally be the worst feeling in the world to screw it up…all I can say is I’m thinking about Watchmen a lot right now.”

The property was previously adapted by filmmaker Zack Snyder in 2009 with a quite faithful representation of the work. However, it landed to a tepid response from both critics and audiences, even if it has scored a little bit of a cult following in recent years.

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/film wrote:HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ TV Series Taps ‘The Leftovers’ Director Nicole Kassell For Pilot

Who directs the Watchmen? The answer, for the pilot of HBO’s new Watchmen TV series adaptation at least, is The Leftovers director Nicole Kassell.

The director of two Leftovers episode will be reteaming with showrunner Damon Lindelof to helm the pilot of his high-profile adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal graphic novel.

Kassell has been tapped by HBO to direct the pilot, which she will executive produce alongside Lindelof, according to Deadline. Lindelof will write the pilot.

Kassell was responsible for two critically acclaimed episodes of The Leftovers – season 2’s “No Room at the Inn” and season 3’s “It’s A Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World” – and has worked on Vinyl, Westworld, The Americans, and Better Call Saul. She made her feature film directorial debut in 2004 with the brutal and disturbing The Woodsman, which starred Kevin Bacon in a creepy, critically lauded performance.

Her resume makes Kassell seem like the perfect fit for Watchmen, a comic book series released in the 1980s which took a sadistic, satirical approach to superheroes, upending the perception that audiences had of the genre. Originally published in 12 issues between 1986 and 1987, Watchmen followed a sprawling story about washed-up superheroes struggling with their place in an increasingly harsh society, and the death of one of their own. It was a revolutionary series replete with surreal flashbacks, current politics, and social commentary whose influence is still being felt today.

HBO’s Watchmen series comes almost 10 years after Zack Snyder’s 2009 feature film, an exceptionally faithful and stylish but bloated adaptation that opened to mixed reception. Lindelof has previously commented on Snyder’s adaptation, saying that he thought the director did the best he could within a two-hour window:

“I think that Zack Snyder made the best possible movie adaptation considering the fact that he was really out to not revise things, the fans really wanted a literal adaptation. That’s exactly what he delivered. He delivered that with an incredible amount of grace and skill. But I think that, for those of us who basically said ‘How do you do Watchmen in a two and a half hour movie?’ He has now answered: ‘This is how.’ You just have to kind of leave it at that. Over time, I think history will basically tell whether the movie was brilliant or less than, but all I can say is how incredibly impressed I personally watching what Zack had accomplished.”

No cast has yet been announced for Lindelof’s adaptation. The project, which hails from Lindelof’s White Rabbit production company in association with Warner Bros. Television, has received an order for backup scripts.

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Giz wrote:Damon Lindelof Unveils His Bold Plans for the Watchmen TV Show in an Emotional Letter to Fans

Watchmen is heading to television—but in a way you might not expect, according to producer and writer Damon Lindelof. In a new letter to fans, the creator channels some of the series’ most beloved moments to explain what’s in store when it eventually makes its way to HBO.

Posted to Instagram today in reaction to discussions about the show adapting one of the most highly-regarded comic series of all time, Lindelof’s letter—formatted in the style of Dr. Manhattan’s pensive thoughts on Mars in Watchmen #4—is deeply and surprisingly personal. It charts his own history experiencing Watchmen for the first time as a child, his relationship with his father, all the way to being given the opportunity to bring the series to TV. And why, at first, he declined to do so:

It’s pretty lengthy—there’s multiple pages that you’ll have to head on over to Instagram itself to see, but Lindelof not only makes it clear that he ardently loves Watchmen as a body of work, but firmly believes in Alan Moore’s wishes that the story told in Watchmen is a story that can only be told in the medium of comics. And so, Lindelof’s revelation: The Watchmen TV series won’t actually adapt Watchmen itself.

HBO’s Watchmen will be set after the events of the comic, and tell an original story in the supposedly peaceful world left in the wake of Adrian Veidt’s shocking plan to avoid nuclear war:
We have no desire to ‘adapt’ the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago. Those issues are sacred ground and will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted.

They will however be remixed. Because the bass lines in those familiar tracks are just too good and we’d be fools not to sample them. Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen. The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica.
Which, interestingly enough, is something DC Comics itself is currently doing in the pages of Doomsday Clock. But, Lindelof continues, the story will not follow the familiar faces of the original Watchmen, but feature new characters and new perspectives, and a tone more in line with the modern world we live in rather than the ‘80s that the original Watchmen was soaked in:
But we are not making a “sequel” either. This story will be set in the world its creators painstakingly built…but in the tradition of the work that inspired it, this new story must be original. It has to vibrate with the seismic unpredictability of its own tectonic plates. It must ask new questions and explore the world through a fresh lens. Most importantly, it must be contemporary. The Old Testament was specific to the Eighties of Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev. Ours needs to resonate with the frequency of Trump and May and Putin and the horse that he rides around on, shirtless. And speaking of Horsemen, The End of the World is off the table… which means the heroes and villains–as if the two are distinguishable–are playing for different stakes entirely.
Lindelof’s letter goes on to note that this doesn’t mean Watchmen’s past is off the table for the show—he teases that “a surprising, yet familiar set of eyes” will look back into the costumed history of the Minutemen and the old heroes of Watchmen’s history. But beyond that, it turns out the new Watchmen show is going to be unlike anything we expected out of it.
pages captured here for posterity. i highly recommend spending the five minutes it takes to read them in their entirety, as a recap above doesn't keep the spirit or context of the thing:
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Re: The Watchmen

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I happen to be a big Lindelof fan, imperfect as he can be, and I think his particular skills around wallowing in gray areas will serve this material very well. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a hit for HBO.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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Also, great letter. He knows the haters will be out with daggers, but Lost and Prometheus have probably given him thick skin at this point.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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TC wrote:yeah i thought this was both a perfect approach, and a perfect pre-emptive response.
"I know I suck, but my dad died so don't hate me so much this time when I suck again please."
Just cut them up like regular chickens

Re: The Watchmen

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darkness wrote:
TC wrote:yeah i thought this was both a perfect approach, and a perfect pre-emptive response.
"I know I suck, but my dad died so don't hate me so much this time when I suck again please."
it's not like he said his mom's name was martha.

Re: The Watchmen

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i really loved s1. quite a bit more than i expected to. if you've watched it, here's a great summary of how it ties into everything:
[youtube][/youtube]

i hate that guy's cadence, but it's a nice vid. can't wait for more.