A few links about and reactions to Watchmen.
- So the box office estimate is around $55 million. This sounds pretty good to me and I don’t think anyone could argue that it’s a failure, but it’s apparently not the massive success the studios were hoping for either. Andre comments:
When I look at these numbers, and the people who want to use these numbers to argue anything about anything, I feel exactly like Dr. Manhattan. Warner’s sold a hard-sell as well as they could. The numbers are good for that, they’re just not good enough to make this an out of the park hit. And that’s that. At the end of the day this was never that film. Maybe someone thought it would be with Snyder at the helm, but it isn’t. It’s too dense, it’s too intellectual, and not in a way with an easy through line. Few are celebrating the fact that one got through, instead a lot of critics seem happy to piss on the grave.
Given the alternate versions, an international release, DVDs and other supplemental material, I bet it will end up doing well enough to be a success.
- The Annotated Watchmen – A guide to the comic book.
- 104 Ways to Hilariously Ruin the Watchmen Movie – A photoshop contest with funny results.
- Wired Interview with Alan Moore: Recent interview with the writer of the Watchmen comic book. There are some interesting bits… Here’s a taste:
At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think, “This is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we’ll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them.” I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.
That isn’t really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.
The movie’s box office prospects aside, I’m positive that the Watchmen movie will be influential. It might very well be the death knell of comic book movies! Or not. But when you get this sort of artful deconstruction of the very concept, it’s hard to break free of it. For instance, the traditional western movie was pretty thoroughly melted by movies like The Wild Bunch, and the genrea never really recovered (except when further opportunities for deconstruction appeared, such as Unforgiven). Westerns simply haven’t been the same since then. And with The Dark Knight and now Watchmen, I have a feeling that superhero movies might not be able to go back to the way things were. Or not. We’ll see, I guess.
Anyway, Moore expands on some of the things I referenced in my post:
There was a time I would have said that if any of my books could work as films, it would have been that first volume of The League [of Extraordinary Gentlemen]. It was pretty much structured so it could have been made straight into a film, and it would have been as powerful as it was in the original publication. But that is to overlook the proclivities of contemporary Hollywood, where I really simply don’t believe that any of my books could be benefited in any way by being turned into films. In fact, quite the opposite. The things I was trying to instill in those books were generally things that were only appropriate to the comics medium.
That’s all for now…