Road to 'Watchmen': From Book to Big Screen

By Scott Huver , Special to Hollywood.com | Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre II and Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl II in Warner Bros. Pictures' 'Watchmen'

It’s been five minutes to midnight for a very, very long time -- a development hell for superheroes

The original 12 Watchmen comic book issues (yes, it was a comic book well before it was a graphic novel) cleverly employed the visual motif of a doomsday clock slowly but increasingly awash with blood as the minutes to Armageddon ticked away. But when it came to bringing Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ landmark work to the big screen, those minutes turned to hours, days, years, and ultimately to decades.

Despite the film’s release in the wake of a pervasive trend of blockbuster superhero cinema such as Batman Begins,The Dark Knight, Iron Man and the Spider-Man and X-Men trilogies, Watchmen is far from just another attempt to translate another standard comic book property into movie form. The original work is its medium’s Ulysses, its War and Peace, the game-changer that in 1986, (along with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, published that same year) propelled superhero storytelling – sometimes kicking and screaming – into a more sophisticated, artistically ambitious and decidedly literal direction. And while it seems the current trend of superhero films is ripe for a similar maturation, filmmakers have been trying to bring Watchmen’s dark and disturbing vision to life since the moment the first issue rocked the comic book world to its core.

“The movie was very hard to get made for several years – unfinancible [sic],” says producer Lawrence Gordon. “We had it set up to get made several times, and the studios pulled out.”

Joel Silver

Gordon, then serving as the president of 20th Century Fox and who was instrumental in bringing films like 48 Hrs, Predator, Die Hard and Field of Dreams to the screen, purchased the rights to Watchmen in August of 1986 – a month before the first issue debuted. Gordon worked with producer Joel Silver (riding high on Lethal Weapon and Die Hard) to develop the film, which got a boost in 1989 with the phenomenal success of the Tim Burton-directed first Batman film.

Screenwriter Sam Hamm, a comics fan who penned the Batman script, took a run at the screenplay, but even after extensive reworking he was ultimately stymied by the length and complexity of the source material. “The comic really is a spectacular piece of architecture,” Hamm told Entertainment Weekly, but “trying to replicate it [was] just impossible.”

The film was put in turnaround in 1991, and Gordon and Silver eventually moved the project to Warner Bros. (which shares a corporate parent with Watchmen’s publisher, DC Comics). Here visionary director and Monty Python stalwart Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) expressed great interest in it and brought on his frequent collaborator Charles McKeown to work on the script (as well as another Batman alum, Warren Skaaren), restoring many of Moore and Gibbons’ original elements.

Superstar names were bandied about to play the central characters – Robin Williams, Richard Gere and even Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dr. Manhattan – but the filmmakers struggled with both financing and the screen story, which after almost a decade of development Gilliam ultimately pronounced “unfilmable [sic].”

Terry Gilliam at the WALL-E Premiere held at the Empire. London, England - 07/13/08

“The problem with Watchmen is that it requires about five hours to tell the story properly, and by reducing it to a two or two-and-a-half hour film, it seemed to me to take away the essence of what Watchmen is about,” Gilliam said in 2000. “I was happy when I didn’t get the money to make it because I would have been embarrassed if we’d done it.”

By 2001 the project had migrated to Universal Studios – Silver had moved on, and Gordon contracted screenwriter David Hayter, hot off the success of the first X-Men film and a renewed Hollywood interest in comic book properties. Though Hayter first envisioned Watchmen as an HBO-style miniseries, that notion was financially unfeasible and – taking inspiration from Peter Jackson’s faithful book-to-screen accomplishments with Lord of the Rings, he instead crafted a screenplay for a feature film version, which even Moore – whose interest in seeing a film version had been initially skeptical and only further soured to the point of oft-proclaimed total disinterest – pronounced “as close as I could imagine anyone getting to Watchmen.”

“It was all about Alan Moore’s vision,” Hayter told Hollywood.com. “To me Watchmen was as close to a perfect story as you could get. I knew that the trap was to try to imprint your own ego on it, or try to ‘improve’ it, and that’s wasn’t the purpose of it. The entire purpose was to protect the original story and to present it as close to the graphic novel as possible.” The screenwriter had to fight constant battles with the studio over its suggested “improvements.” “It was relatively simple to adapt, but it was very difficult to protect along the way.”

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