Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was relatively well-received by fans and overall was a box office success. Devoted to making a faithful adaptation of the Alan Moore/ Dave Gibbons graphic novel, the fact that Snyder’s Watchmen film got made on the scale it did is a miracle. However, several other versions of Watchmen were in the works before Snyder got involved, with several coming close to being made. In this episode of WTF Happened to this Unmade Movie, we dig into versions that almost got made involving folks such as Terry Gilliam, David Hayter (who filmed a demo reel with Ray Stevenson and Rorschach and Iain Glen as Nite Owl), Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass. Suppose any of these versions had gotten made. In that case, we might have gotten someone like Paddy Considine as Rorschach, Joaquin Phoenix as Nite Owl, and possibly even Tom Cruise as Ozymandias (in which case the adaptation likely would have had little to do with Moore’s comic).
In the end, perhaps it was best that no one succeeded in getting the movie made until Snyder, with it also paving the way for the excellent HBO limited series and maybe some future Watchmen stories to come.
This episode of WTF Happened to this Unmade Movie is written by Bryan Wolford, edited by Paul Cooper and narrated by Bronwyn Kelly-Seigh.
Which version of Watchmen do you think would have been the best? Are we lucky no one succeeded until Zack Snyder got involved? Let us know in the comments.