Back in 2009, Zack Snyder achieved what many thought impossible when he brought Alan Moore and Dave Hibbons seminal comic book Watchmen to the screen. However, things could have been different had Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard) had his way, with the producer spending much of the late 80s and the early 90s attempting to get his own adaptation off the ground alongside director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Zero Theorem). And, speaking to Coming Soon, Silver has spoken about his plans for Watchmen, stating that their take on the material would have been “MUCH better” than that of Snyder:
“It was a MUCH much better movie. Oh God. I mean, Zack [Snyder] came at it the right way but was too much of a slave to the material. [We were working from] a Sam Hamm script–who had written a script that everybody loved for the first Batman – and then [Gilliam] brought in a guy who’d worked for him to do work on it [Charles McKeown, co-writer of Brazil]. What he did was he told the story as-is, but instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing which was too hard and too silly, what he did was he maintained that the existence of Doctor Manhattan had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure. He felt that THAT character really altered the way reality had been.”
“[McKeown] had the Ozymandias character convince, essentially, the Doctor Manhattan character to go back and stop himself from being created, so there never would be a Doctor Manhattan character,” Silver continues. “He was the only character with real supernatural powers, he went back and prevented himself from being turned into Doctor Manhattan, and in the vortex that was created after that occurred these characters from “Watchmen” only became characters in a comic book… So the three characters, I think it was Rorschach and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, they’re all of the sudden in Times Square and there’s a kid reading a comic book.. and he’s like, ‘Hey, you’re just like in my comic book.’ It was very smart, it was very articulate, and it really gave a very satisfying resolution to the story, but it just didn’t happen. Lost to time.”
Would you have liked to see Joel Silver and Terry Gilliam’s Watchmen? Let us know in the comments below or head on over to The Flickering Myth Forum…
Originally published February 27, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
