Watchmen Was the Superhero Epic 2009 Wasn't Ready For

Every now and then, Hollywood stares down a sacred cow and says: yeah, we’re doing this. In 2009, that sacred cow was Watchmen. Not just a superhero saga — a razor blade across the idea of superheroes — and Zack Snyder decided to bring it to the screen almost panel for panel. Here’s how we got there, why the ending morphed, and how the whole thing actually landed.

The comic everyone swore you couldn’t (or shouldn’t) film

Watchmen — a 12-issue DC series from writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons — builds an alternate America where costumed vigilantes first popped up as the Minutemen, then the accidental creation of Doctor Manhattan rewired geopolitics. Manhattan helps the U.S. win Vietnam, Nixon scraps term limits and sits in the Oval Office into the ’80s, and by 1977 superheroes are outlawed.

The plot kicks off in October 1985 with a murder: Edward Blake, once the government-backed Comedian — yes, the same guy who helped take out JFK — gets thrown out a window. Initially, Moore dreamed up this as a story starring characters DC had just acquired from Charlton Comics. The murdered hero would have been Peacemaker and the book’s title would have been Who Killed the Peacemaker? DC said: make your own characters instead.

With masks illegal, only one vigilante refuses to quit: Rorschach. He starts digging and reconnects with a few ghosts of the cape-and-cowl era — the detached blue demigod Doctor Manhattan; genius industrialist Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias; Laurie Juspeczyk, the second Silk Spectre; and Dan Dreiberg, the second Nite Owl. Things spiral: Manhattan exiles himself to Mars, Veidt dodges an assassination attempt, Rorschach gets locked up, and the world inches toward nuclear midnight. Maybe this is a serial killer picking off ex-heroes. Maybe it’s something much bigger.

Everyone in here is flawed to the bone. Rorschach is a zealot on a hair trigger, the Comedian is a charming monster, and Manhattan is godlike and unsettlingly distant — especially in his private life. Moore leans into messy relationships, broken sex lives, and the sour taste of power. It’s a filthy, human world with one hell of a moral gut-punch waiting at the end.

A winding, messy, oddly fascinating march to the screen

• 1986: Film rights get snapped up while the comic is still running. Producer Lawrence Gordon asks Moore to write the script. He passes. Sam Hamm (fresh off Batman) writes a draft that keeps a lot, adds a Statue of Liberty terrorist opener, and swaps out the ending. Terry Gilliam signs on to direct; Charles McKeown does a polish.
• 1991: Fox lets it go. Gilliam brings it to Warner Bros., which offers $25 million when he needs closer to $100 million. He walks and calls the thing unfilmable.
• 2001: Gordon takes Watchmen to Universal. David Hayter (who had worked on X-Men) is hired to write and direct. He stays pretty faithful, but — again — the ending changes. Creative issues flare, and a move to Revolution Studios is floated before that outfit implodes.
• Mid-2000s: Watchmen lands at Paramount. Michael Bay is briefly in the mix. Darren Aronofsky is hired, then bails to make The Fountain. Paul Greengrass steps in. Then Paramount steps out.
• Back to Warner Bros.: Tim Burton is curious, but the studio goes with Zack Snyder after the success of 300. This time, it actually happens.

Snyder’s play: match the panels, build a world

Snyder brings a maximalist, faithful streak. Alex Tse rewrites Hayter’s script to hew even closer to the book. You can’t fit every beat — a motion comic that adapts the whole thing still runs about six hours and trims a lot of dialogue — but the movie jams in as much as it can.

Snyder even wanted to mount a live-action Tales of the Black Freighter — the grim pirate comic that threads through Watchmen — as a side project. The $20 million price tag killed that idea. Instead, it became an animated short directed by Daniel DelPurgatorio and Mike Smith.

He also joked that if he couldn’t pull this off, he’d hang up action movies and go make rom-coms. The cast he assembled is tough to argue with: Patrick Wilson as Dan Dreiberg, Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach, Billy Crudup as Doctor Manhattan, Malin Akerman as Laurie (with Carla Gugino as her mother), Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the doomed Comedian. Stephen McHattie, Matt Frewer, and Danny Woodburn pop up in key supporting roles. Hard to picture these characters any other way now.

New York by way of Vancouver (and a dash of Kubrick)

Even though the story lives in New York, production planted itself in Vancouver. There was talk about using California backlots for exteriors, but building a new backlot with bluescreen-friendly backdrops meant they could lean on CG cityscapes later. So they took over a 14-acre lumberyard in British Columbia and built three blocks of midtown Manhattan. Thousands of wooden two-by-fours, hundreds of thousands of square feet of foam brick, then weeks of dirtying it all up so it looked like people actually lived there. Part of that backlot doubled for Saigon, and the rest of the movie used real B.C. interiors. The NORAD war room? Designed as a deliberate nod to Dr. Strangelove.

Moore stayed skeptical, as he tends to with adaptations of his work. Gibbons, on the other hand, visited the set and left starry-eyed.

"I was overwhelmed by the commitment, the passion, the palpable desire to do this right."

That passion bled all the way to Snyder’s elevator pitch for the movie:

"In my movie, Superman doesn’t care about humanity, Batman can’t get it up, and the bad guy wants world peace."

About that ending

Snyder cranks up the violence and leans on slow-motion. Some fans bristled. But for most of its runtime, the film tracks very close to the book — until the ending, which has been a problem for every iteration.

On the page, Ozymandias decides the only way to stop World War III is terror on a cosmic scale. He and a team of writers, artists, and scientists create a fake alien — a massive squid-like horror built around a cloned, boosted psychic brain — and teleport it into Manhattan. The thing detonates on arrival, blasting out a psychic shockwave that kills half the city. The world bands together against a supposed outside threat. It’s brilliant. It’s also deeply weird and complicated to explain in under three minutes of screen time.

Different scripts tried different outs:

Hamm and McKeown: a time-travel assassination. Hayter: a satellite that fires concentrated solar radiation. What stuck for the movie we got was Tse’s revision: Ozymandias frames Doctor Manhattan himself as the looming boogeyman. No fake alien to explain. You already have a god on Earth to blame, and that god is terrifying enough to keep superpowers in line.

Release, numbers, and the cold shower of 2009

Shot from September 2007 to February 2008, Watchmen hit theaters in March 2009 on a budget somewhere between $130 and $150 million. It opened to $55 million and then fell off fast, finishing with $187 million worldwide.

The theatrical cut runs 162 minutes. The home-video director’s cut stretches to 186. If you want the full sprawl, the Ultimate Cut stitches in the animated Black Freighter and climbs to 215 minutes.

Critics split. The film sits in the mid-60s at Rotten Tomatoes, with some calling it bold, stylish, and singular, and others seeing an oddly hollow, disjointed replica that worships the panels without finding its own pulse. Audiences handed it a solid B CinemaScore. Christopher Nolan later mused that it might have fared better a few years deeper into the superhero boom, post-Avengers, when a big-budget deconstruction would have landed cleaner.

"As a comic book, Watchmen is an extraordinary thing. As a movie, it’s just another movie."

That line from critic Nick Dent hit home for a lot of fans.

So… did the movie pull it off?

Watchmen didn’t become the all-timer many wanted, but it’s still one of the biggest swings a studio has ever taken with a comic book. The drama and intimacy on the page don’t always translate; the craft and the world-building absolutely do. Even its compromises are interesting. And love it or not, you can’t call it timid.