Let's get this out of the way right away: Jonze's Wild Things is only an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book in the loosest possible sense. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Jonze, whose Adaptation was a dissertation on the impossibility of adapting a literary work to film, has treated the Sendak book as a mere jumping-off point. There are only a handful of incidents in Sendak's book, but at least half of them don't appear in the movie. Instead of using the book's spare narrative as a framework and adding to it, the movie mostly creates a new story from scratch.

In a way, WTWTA is the polar opposite of Watchmen: Zack Snyder faced a 12-book magnum opus of graphic storytelling, and tried to distill it to three hours without losing anything essential or changing anything (except the ending.) Jonze takes Sendak's twelve sentences and expands them to 100 minutes of incidents. And yet, both films wind up feeling lovely but a bit empty, triumphs of gorgeous imagery over substance.

This review is not going to tell you whether Wild Things is good, or whether you'll like it — after talking to tons of people who've seen the movie, I've come to the conclusion that this is such an idiosyncratic, strange movie that it's impossible to predict whether you'll like it or not. So far, everybody I've talked to has either loved it or hated it — and I have a feeling that sharp divide will be the norm. It also may be the sort of movie that you'll only fully appreciate on a third viewing, with the right substances in the mix. (If you want to read an unreservedly rave review of the movie, check out Entertainment Weekly's.)

Wild Things is not a movie about a little boy who wants to be wild, traveling (in his fantasy, or via magic) to a strange land full of monsters who make him their king and let him be as wild as he wants, until he gets homesick. Rather, Wild Things is a movie about the terrors and insecurities of childhood, and the monsters we all have inside of us. It presents an unnerving portrait of childhood as a stormy, exhilerating time, in which play is intensely serious and important, and loneliness is the biggest nightmare of them all.

Max, who's around ten, lives with his divorced mom, who's slowly failing at her job and barely making ends meet thanks to her shitty absentee ex-husband. She's dating a new guy, whom Max hates. Meanwhile, Max's older sister, Claire, who used to be his friend, has stopped hanging out with him because she's trying to get in with a cool crowd at school. Max acts out, trying to get people to pay attention to him, but it only makes matters worse — so finally, Max screams "feed me, woman!" at his mom, in front of her new boyfriend, and then actually bites her. He's sent to his room, but he runs away from home, until he finds a boat, which takes him to the land of the Wild Things.

Whether you love or hate this movie will depend most on how you feel about the Wild Things, who are sort of weird and totemic. They look like the creatures in Sendak's book — until they open their mouths.

What comes out of the Wild Things' mouths is a stream of complaints and bitter observations, punctuated by moments of extreme, shining whimsy. It keeps you off guard: The monsters, one and all, seem miserable, upset and perennially disappointed by life, but then they come out with cute, occasionally hilarious lines. While the monsters serve to amplify the conflicts, anxieties and destructive glee inside of Max, they don't really feel like aspects of a child's psyche to me — they come across more like emotionally stunted, narcissistic middle-aged people.

I didn't realize the main monster, Carol, was voiced by James Gandolfini until after I saw the film, because i saw a super-early screening and hadn't read much press before hand. So to me, Carol just sounded like a cranky, neurotic old guy with anger issues. At times during the main body of the story, I felt like I was sitting on a particularly long therapy session in a group home, or a Seinfeld episode with fewer jokes.

On the other hand, other people I've talked to who've seen the movie found the Wild Things much more convincing, and compelling, as aspects of Max's inner life, made real and massive. So your mileage may indeed vary.

But whatever you think they are, it's made clear that the Wild Things form an utterly dysfunctional family, one where you sense the same arguments have been going on for decades and will continue for decades more. Carol is upset because another one of the monsters, K.W. (Lauren Ambrose) has decided to leave the group and go spend time with her new friends, who turn out to be weird owls that you have to hit with rocks before you can talk to them. Carol is bursting with resentment and neediness, and when we first meet him he's trashing the other Wild Things' houses like an alcoholic, abusive dad. K.W., meanwhile, just acts like she's sick of everyone's shit.

Then there are two other Wild Things, Judith and Ira, who constantly feel neglected and marginalized within the group — Judith complains every few moments that whatever activities the gang of monsters does, she and her companion are pushed to the side. Nobody cares what they think, nobody pays attention to them, etc. There's also a big bull, who's sort of bull-like.

Here's the scene where we get introduced to some of them, and Judith is like "Oh, you don't need to know me, I'm kind of a downer." The tree-destroying thing is cute, though, as is the tongue thing:

So, yeah... dysfunctional family of losers. Who are depressed. A lot.

But it's not all anhedonia — a big point of the film is that Max shows up and shakes up the monsters' dreadful staleness, becoming their King and giving them a whole bunch of new games to play. "We'll take care of each other, and sleep together in a real pile," Max says. Unlike the people in Max's real life, these monsters pay attention to him and are curious about him, and sort of become his minions.

When Max convinces the Wild Things that he's a King, and that he was a King among the Vikings for twenty years already, it's a brilliantly whimsical scene. Max Records, as Max, shines the most in these quirky moments where's spinning a line of amazing B.S., talking about his crazy super-powers and his amazing leadership skills. The "let the Wild Rumpus begin!" sequence is severely fun and insane, culminating in a crazed puppy pile. And later, when Max concocts a crazy scheme to build a huge fort, with a crime lab and spy gadgets and all sorts of other weird superhero/scifi touches, he's the total nerd-kid avatar, with a team of monsters doing his manic bidding.

But you sort of know, all along, that this whole "king" thing will not turn out well — and that's the biggest departure from the book. Forget the fact that the movie dispenses with the book's "bedroom turns into wild jungle" sequence — the biggest change is that it's much clearer that Max is a failed king, and the monsters end up hating him. This happens partly because Max decides to split the monsters into "good guys" and "bad guys," drawing them into a war fought with dirt clods, which quickly turns ugly. Max makes Judith and Ira into "bad guys," exacerbating their persecution complex, and you can just see in this clip the beginning of things going South:

Sorry to give away so much of the movie's plot — this really isn't a movie you'd go see for the plot, though. It's much more about the weird little touches and character quirks, the lush visuals, and the blaring-loud, wordless score by Karen O. and Carter Burwell.

As I said in the beginning, this movie offers the coldest comfort of any film in Spike Jonze's career. It feels like a journey into sheer dysphoria — Max's home life is unrelentingly horrendous, and when he escapes to a fantasy land, it turns out to be even worse. The film's message seems to be that life sucks, growing up sucks, and most of all, any attempt to escape into wildness or fantasy will only turn out even suckier.

I don't think WTWTA is too scary for small children — but I suspect it may be too nihilistic. Teenagers and tweens, though, may love it.

The film reinforces its dark message with an unblinking stare aimed at blank landscapes. When we first meet Max in the "real" world, the world is blanketed with snow, and Jonze's camera zooms in on the unrelenting whiteness. Max builds a snow fort and hides inside, and he appears to be in a blinding snow tunnel. When Max travels to the land of the Wild Things, at first he's in that famous forest/jungle setting, but the film quickly moves to the blank dunes of the Melbourne area, where Jonze filmed. The landscape is meant to reflect the moods of Max and the Wild Things, which grow increasingly joyless and unrelenting.

Here's a bit where Carol and Max walk through a desolate landscape, and Carol talks about how the landscape used to be rocks, and now it's sand, and soon it'll be dust, and who knows what comes after dust? And then Max says the sun is going to die, and Carol tries to put a brave face on that piece of info:

(The film's visuals, it must be said, really are incredible — the film has brilliant design, from the monsters to their weird circular wicker-like buildings.)

If you think of this as a kids' movie, you'll be sadly disappointed. If you think of it as an adventure film, you'll be puzzled. But think of it as a continuation of Jonze's first two movies, and it makes perfect sense. Like Malkovich and Adaptation, WTWTA is about someone who's uneasy in his own skin — Max literally seeks liberation by donning his wolf costume, and this leads him to his adventure — and like the heroes of Malkovich and Adaptation, Max discovers, the hard way, that being someone else is no solution to his problems, but also that it's a kind of trap.

The main difference is that Wild Things feels much more surreal than those first two films, thanks to the weird Jim Henson/CG creatures. And it's about a kid, rather than a thirtysomething or fortysomething guy. In a sense, Wild Things does for the coming-of-age tale what Jonze's first two movies do for the midlife crisis/second chance story: strip away the candy coating on the fantasy to reach the pure existential crisis beneath, and show how insoluble that crisis really is.

During an interview to promote his new The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Gilliam revealed what he thought about Snyder's take on the classic graphic novel:

It got trashed, but there are great sequences in there, but the overall effect is kind of turgid in a certain way. I started putting it down to… you know, in the comic book, or graphic novel… They're still comic books to me (laughs)… It's like the Comedian's coffin is going into the grave with the stars and stripes on top of it and reading it in the comic book it's three panels, boom, boom and boom. On film "hhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm…"

The pace is wrong. I was glad our version didn't get done, the one that Charles McKeown and I had wrote, because we had reduced it down to about two hours and five minutes I think and we lost so much. Comedian was cut down to next to nothing. So (Zack Snyder) did a good job, but it just felt… I also thought The Incredibles had kind of fucked it for him... [S]o much of that material had been in a quarry that everybody had been digging goodies out of and suddenly you get lost. I think Watchmen really bothered me, because I thought it should be better. It was all there. It looked right, but to me it was pace. It didn't have pace. It needed a bit more quirkiness in there. Dr. Manhattan was getting boring, frankly, and then Ozymandias by the end I thought "Oh, come on!" They lost me by the end, frankly, but it was certainly looking better than what I was going to do! (laughs)

Quint chats with Terry Gilliam about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Watchmen, Pixar, Ledger and much more! [Ain't It Cool]

Standing here, in the middle of San Diego Comic Con, it's easy to feel as though the movie industry is a huge maw — sucking up every stray thought or tingle of creativity that anyone has ever had, and mashing them all into new reasons for Brad Pitt to grimace. Hollywood feels all-consuming, when you're surrounded by hype for upcoming comic-book and disaster movies.

I was actually going to do a list of "gloriously unfilmable books," but then I Googled to make sure io9 hadn't already done that post. We hadn't, but SciFiWire, Screenhead and hard-SF writer Mike Brotherton all have. And after I'd already started writing this post, Wired Magazine did one too. (And io9 contributor Jeff VanderMeer and the CrazyMonk blog have great comments on the Screenhead post.) The unfilmable novels include some literary giants, like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami, some masterpieces of thought-provoking science fiction, including Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, and Connie Willis, and some giant epics, like Gene Wolfe's Book Of The New Sun and Dan Simmons' Hyperion. I would add at least some of Iain Banks' Culture novels, some Joanna Russ, and a lot of Rudy Rucker's work.

(Incidentally, the movie of William Gibson's Neuromancer? Still definitely happening, according to inside sources I've talked to recently.)

So instead of doing a list of unfilmable novels, let's discuss the whole idea of a book being "unfilmable." First of all, is it true that there are "unfilmable" books (as opposed to books that shouldn't be filmed?). And what makes a book unfilmable? And finally, what do these supposedly unfilmable books tell us about the process of translating a book to film?

Jeff VanderMeer makes a really fascinating point in his response to the Screenhead post. He writes:

I also think this brings up a serious point: more novels should be unfilmable. Because this speaks to what about the form cannot be replicated in other art forms. When I was writing Shriek, one thing I had foremost in my head was to create something that couldn't be filmed (well, except for little excerpts of it...).

Yes, there are unfilmable books.

So is there such a thing as an unfilmable book? I'd say the answer to that is a resounding "Yes." Sure, people used to say Lord Of The Rings and Watchmen were unfilmable, and they were proved wrong. But those two examples don't disprove the existence of the unfilmable book, as a species. Some books are too abstract, too complex, too idea-driven, or too non-mainstream to become a Hollywood movie, or any kind of movie for that matter.

Take Rudy Rucker's Postsingular and its sequel, Hylozoic. They're fresh in my mind because I just read Hylozoic recently, and there's so much in those novels that you could never possibly convert into a series of sounds and visual images. You have the nano-machines, the "nants," devouring the entire world and porting everybody to a virtual Earth simulation called "Vearth." And after the nants are turned back, you have a kind of global awakening via a network of Orphids, machines which turn every object fully interactive. And soon, everybody on Earth is quasi-telepathic and able to spy on each other via the OrphidNet. And people can expand their consciousness by connecting to a kind of group mind called the Big Pig. Oh, and they create plastic self-aware robots called Shoons, and contact giants from another plane of existence (the Hibrane) who show them how to "unroll the Lazy Eight" dimension. I feel like I'm barely scraping the surface here, and any Hollywood scriptwriter would need a week in a sensory deprivation tank after trying to turn this into a screenplay.

We went to a reading and booksigning for Jacqueline Carey a while back, and she mentioned, with obvious glee, that her magnificent "Kushiel" books couldn't be made into movies. Partly, that's because of their huge scope and complexity — but mostly, it's because of the subject matter. Especially in the first three books, the main character is a sacred prostitute who can turn pain into pleasure (I'm oversimplifying a bit), and sex work and S/M are woven into the story so deeply, you can't remove them without the whole thing falling apart. Not to mention, the fact that her story takes place in alternate France that worships the bastard son of Jesus Christ, who teaches that you should "love as thou wilt," including S/M as well as homosexuality. There are many ways to make a terrible movie of Kushiel's Dart, but no way to make a good one — at least within Hollywood.

Some books just aren't visual enough to make good movies — take Le Guin's The Dispossessed. You could, I suppose, make a somewhat lifeless film about a physicist from an anarchist planet who travels to a capitalist one. But it would be missing everything that makes The Dispossessed brilliant, from its exploration of the limits and virtues of Annares' utopia, to its dead-on depiction of academic politics, to the investigation of physics and philosophy that lie at the core of the development of "simultenaeity physics." How do you make a compelling movie about someone coming up with a new way to think about space/time?

Watchmen and Lord Of The Rings, by contrast, are both action/adventure stories. They were already woven into the fabric of tons of other superhero and fantasy movies long before they came to the silver screen. Turning them into movies required a deft touch, to be sure, but there was nothing in either work that was antithetical to the needs of the movie form. (Except, possibly, Watchmen's giant alien squid.)

And novels that are even more unfilmable than the ones mentioned above also exist. Some of them aren't particularly great as books either — there are novels that are so dreadful, so dull, or so pointlessly offensive that you'd go mad trying to adapt them. I've read many of these books, so I know.

I should add a caveat: even if a book really is unfilmable, you can always make a movie with the same title and one or two character names, with nothing else in common with the original. If you include works loosely inspired by a book, then yes, anything is "filmable."

Are there books that can be filmed, but shouldn't?

As to whether a science fiction novel shouldn't be turned into a film, that's slightly more of a value judgment than the question of whether it can. Many people — myself included — argued that Watchmen shouldn't be a movie. In my case, I was groping towards the theory that a movie that was faithful to the graphic novel would be both too dark and too dull. I wrote:

I don't really doubt that we'll end up with a note-for-note mimicking of the graphic novel, transplanted to the screen. But will it be worth watching?... The Watchmen movie won't be able to duplicate the things that were awesome and juicy about the original graphic novel. And in its attempt to grasp at something that can't be captured, it may wind up being kind of boring.

Looking back at what I wrote, I'm not sure I made the case conclusively — I focused too much, in that essay, on discussing the things that Watchmen does that are unique to the graphic novel form, and discounted the possibility that the movie could do similar things in a different way. I didn't talk enough about the story itself, and the things about it that could, or could not, make for a good movie.

And then, a year ago today, I saw a bunch of footage and talked to Zack Snyder, and came around to the idea that his movie could work — it could be about the history of superhero movies, in the same way the graphic novel was about the history of comics. On the other hand, the actual movie that resulted really was a bit lifeless, as I'd originally feared — especially in the final act.

You'll find no shortage of novelists who feel their books shouldn't be movies, that too much would have to be sacrificed to the crudeness of the movie form.

But actually, thinking about it some more, I think it's a lot harder to argue that something shouldn't be filmed than that it can't be. If you're going to argue that it's possible to make a movie of your favorite book, but too much would be lost in the adaptation, you're shouldering the burden of proof. You have to identify just what elements would be lost — and make a stab at understanding how a work gets ported from "book" to "movie."

What does the process of adapting a novel to films tell us about movies and books?

Much of what Alan Moore said, in arguing that Watchmen shouldn't become a movie, is true of all printed works. You read a book at your own pace, with the ability to flip back and forth as you notice connections between things that happened in the previous chapter and things that are happening now. You do much more of the work of imagining the world in your head — even if there are illustrations. The book is frozen; the reader moves. It's the opposite of a film, in a sense.

I think people who believe that any novel that's brave, or complicated, or emotionally rich, will automatically make for an unfulfilling movie are slightly selling the medium of film short. You can do a lot in visual shorthand in movies, and there's a lot more scope to convey information in a way that will go over the heads of some viewers but resonate with others. Any film worth its photons works on multiple levels, for different audiences. A decent actor can convey a whole chapter's worth of backstory with a meaningful look.

Maybe, when adapting a book to a movie, there's something like T.S. Elliott's "objective correlative": you can put in visual cues, props and hints that stand in for complicated ideas and emotions inside a book.

My favorite book-to-film projects include Adaptation, which takes Susan Orlean's introspective work of journalism The Orchid Thief and turns it into a bizarre pomo story of two screenwriter brothers struggling with an inscrutable story. And then there's American Splendor, the film which adapts Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comics the only way you could: with a mixture of documentary and reenactment, with the two crossing over in a surreal fashion.

Of course, both of those movies experiment with the movie format to try and do justice to a quirky, unusual book. It's hard to imagine a science fiction movie doing something similar, unless it was a low-budget indie like Primer or Moon. Certainly, the kind of big-budget movie that a book like, say, Neuromancer demands is not going to support much in the way of stylistic experimentation. But maybe there are other ways of doing what those films do — bringing in some of the metatextual quirks of the books by adding a narrative voice-over, say, or a Verhoeven-esque set of fake commercials.

But really, that brings us to the biggest problem with adapting movies to books — big-budget Hollywood film genres are much more restrictive than book genres, at least right now. You have superhero films, disaster films, space-horror films and the occasional space opera. But that can always change — it was only a decade ago that you could count the number of satisfying superhero films on one hand, and now it's the "it" genre.

So maybe instead of hoping that your favorite book never becomes a movie, you should hope it does — and in the process of being filmed, it expands, just a bit, the circumference of Hollywood's narrow sphere of possibility. After all, it never hurts to be optimistic.

Say what you will about where Snyder "dropped the squid" in his Watchmen movie translation, you can not argue that the director pored over each shot, set, costume, prop and reference. The attention to detail is borderline unhealthy, but delightful to revisit.

The special features on the new Blu-Ray DVD release are most likely going to be the saving grace for Watchmen. This is where Zack's abilities as a director and fan boy panderer will shine. Who wouldn't get excited listening to him talk about the Ridley Scott references, and how they made the Comedian punch through the wall.

Still, it should be very interesting to see what he has to say about the meddled-with ending. I hope he has the stones to just pull David Hayter on camera and say, ask this guy! Ask him why he handed the most important line of the book from Dr. Manhattan to another character? Ask Hayter why he left out all the destruction and carnage from the last few shots. Oh wait, we did, and we're still not happy with the answer. Trot Hayter out there during the ending scene to answer these questions, I double dog dare you, and I'll be first in line with my fist full of cash for the Blu-Ray.

All in all, it's a cool thing that they are attempting to do with all this new fancy DVD technology, and I think it's marvelous for a film like Watchmen where there was so much detail you almost need a tour-guide to get through the film — and who better than the director? The DVD will be released on July 21st.

[Hollywood Reporter and Slashfilm]

News broke earlier this week that G4 would be broadcasting Lucasfilm's Saturday afternoon Star Wars panel as part of their five-hour SDCC coverage, and that news was immediately followed by Warner Bros' announcement that a special SDCC Watchmen screening (also on Saturday) will be streamed as a live interactive BD-Live event for everyone in North America who bought Watchmen on Blu-Ray, allowing them to hear director Zack Snyder's commentary and ask the director questions. Snyder is excited about the event:

Comic-Con, it isn't just [for] comic book fanatics, it's cinephiles as well. It'll be cool to discuss what people are thinking.

With the con already sold out - although Comic-Con has hinted that returned or unclaimed passes may be sold closer to the event this year - and the show's schedule still officially unannounced, we're wondering if these two events are special stunts, or the start of a new way to experience the con without the heat, discomfort and awkward chance of meeting your heroes in the restroom before their panel.

San Diego Comic-Con runs July 23rd through the 26th, with Preview Night on the 22nd.

According to Collider, Snyder announced the release date for the director's cut at a Blu-Ray presentation, at Warner Brothers.

The film will play in theaters "the weekend before Comic-Con in Los Angeles, Dallas, Minneapolis, and New York," and, last we heard, will run at about 3 hours and 10 minutes.

One of my biggest pet peeves of the film (among many) was that Snyder was forced to cut the death of the original Nite Owl. The brutal beat-down with his own award was a horrific moment that clearly demonstrated the current state-of-panicked-mind that the Watchmen world was in, and how different people responded to the tension. Unfortunately, Snyder was forced to part with the scene he had already shot due to time constraints, but promised it would be in the DVD. I'll be happy to see this back in, and hopefully it will help to flesh out the alternate universe and aid in making Ozzy's big decision feel slightly less out of left field (although still shocking to the core). Here's the page for those of you who haven't read it. Go read it, by the way.

It should also be interesting to see how they loop the news stand buddies and the Black Freighter into the live action.

Eastman spilled the beans to Film School Rejects over the weekend that James Cameron, Zack Snyder, Gore Verbinski and David Fincher have signed on to the long-awaited anthology movie spun out of the long-running comic magazine:

I've got breaking news that Fincher and James Cameron are going to be Co-Executive Producers on the film. Fincher will direct one. Cameron will direct one. Zack Snyder is going to direct one and Gore Verbinski is going to. Mark Osborne and Jack Black from Tenacious D are going to do a comedy segment for the film. Three other directors have agreed but we haven't signed them, but they're equally as jaw-dropping. So we're on cloud nine to be working with such an amazing amount of talent.

That's an amazing collection of talent, but we're worried about the fact that there will be another three directors added to the five listed; just how long is this movie going to be? Or, more depressingly, is each segment going to be incredibly short?

‘Heavy Metal' Adds Cameron, Verbinksi, Snyder as Directors [Film School Rejects]

If you're not familiar with the Watchmen graphic novel, the Black Freighter is a comic that one of the side characters reads throughout each chapter. In Alan Moore's alternate history, there are no superhero comics, only pirate comics.

The story of Black Freighter follows a marooned sea captain, as he desperately rides a boat made out of his dead crewmates home, in hopes of catching up to the evil sea dogs that killed everyone - before they reach his little town. In the animated version, the haunted inner monologue of the captain is voiced expertly by 300's Gerard Butler. The Black Freighter's animation works incredibly well for this grisly retelling. It's brilliantly executed, stark and chilling (even if you already know the ending). And if you're wondering if the DVD is as gruesome as it needs to be, yes, 1,000 times yes, watching the captain rip apart his intestine spewing crew by hand was delightfully disturbing.

Will the pirate-themed animation work when it's spliced in and out of the sequences in the Directors Cut Watchmen DVD? I'm not so sure. But I can't wait to hear Butler's mad voice ring out over the streets of the movie's alternate New York, while the little newsstand fella cracks open the latest issue.

Under The Hood:

Also on the Black Freighter DVD is a 1970s newscast exploring the writings of fictional Minute Man member Hollis Mason, otherwise known as the original Nite Owl. In the graphic novel, Mason pens a tell-all book about the men and women in masks, titled Under The Hood. The DVD contains a 1970s Dateline-esque show called The Culpeper Minute, which includes interviews with the characters involved with the book. Just about everyone from the movie's alternate history is interviewed, from a 70s looking Sally Jupiter to the author himself. Of course, the Comedian (whom Mason singles out for opprobrium in the novel) only has a paparazzi-style "get that camera out of my face" video moment. The whole segment is pretty fascinating - and I would imagine incredibly helpful to those who haven't read the novel - but it drags in a lot of places, for those of us who know all about Hooded Justice and other lesser known Minute Men.

Still, I was very impressed with Carla Gugino's "no comment" when pressed by the reporter about the Comedian's alleged assault, which Under The Hood mentions.

Firstly, to placate the nervous: Yes, $55.7 million is a lot of money; Watchmen's first weekend is the third-largest March opening of all time (even including adjustments for inflation), second largest IMAX opening (behind The Dark Knight), 12th largest superhero movie opening (20th when adjusted for inflation) and 6th largest R-rated opening (14th when adjusted for inflation), none of which is to be laughed at. Furthermore, Warners domestic distribution president Dan Fellman has said that the studio is "pleased" with the opening weekend. The New York Daily News is even predicting that the movie's success will usher in even more superhero movies - although, admittedly, the examples it cites were all greenlit before the movie opened.

However.

(And you knew there was a "however," didn't you?)

Even ignoring the fact that all the talk of Watchmen beating Zack Snyder's previous movie, 300 to take the March crown was optimistic at best (Although I'm unconvinced by the "The length of the movie meant that it never had a chance" arguments, I have to admit; Watchmen is only 13 minutes longer than The Dark Knight, after all, and the latter outperformed the former by more than 100% per theatre in its opening weekend), there are still signs that Watchmen's performance may cause headaches for its producers after all. The worrying drops of the three days from the movie's weekend - $25 million to $19 million to $11 million - is noteworthy, although whether it's because of negative word of mouth or simply what happens when all the fans see the movie on opening night and then you're left with an somewhat-disinterested general public is open to question. We'll get to see in following days, and especially this coming weekend, whether non-fans are taking to the movie (as well as, perhaps, how much repeat business the movie gets from its most eager supporters).

More worrying to those involved now, however, is whether Watchmen will make any money for Warners at all in its initial run; the Hollywood Reporter isn't sure that it will:

Judging by a NYU's professor's regression model on how opening weekend box office numbers predict total movie grosses, and adjusting downward due to expected higher-than-normal opening weekend geek fandom, we'd expect this film to eventually gross about, or just above, $130 million domestically when all is said and done (Paramount holds overseas rights). Funny enough, that happens to be the same figure as the reported budget of the film.

That's not factoring in the money spent on promotion or the payout that Warners owes to Fox as a result of the lawsuit, of course (which may go as high as 8.5% of Warner's take). While Devin Chud is right that pretty much all movies make money at some point of their existence - especially considering the inevitability of numerous "Director's Cut" versions on DVD in the future selling to the hardcore fanbase - there's no escaping the fact that, if the Reporter's projections are right and this movie doesn't turn a profit for Warners in theaters, Watchmen's performance can definitely be viewed as a disappointment.

All of this may be beside the point for some; there is definitely an argument to be made that like it or not, the fact that the movie was made at all could be considered an achievement, and a more important one than box office could ever be (Man, where were those people when Speed Racer tanked?), but it'd be shortsighted at best to think that Watchmen's performance is entirely unimportant or won't affect other unknown comic properties. For now, we're all watching Watchmen... if only to see whether the movie will, accidentally, have as big an effect on superhero movies as the comic did on superhero comics.

yU+Co, the company that created the opening credits with Zack Snyder, have released the clip that everyone is clamoring for. The opening titles in Watchmen are absolutely beautiful each shot is worthy of being framed.

The first thing that director Zack Snyder ever revealed about the studio's planned "changes" to Watchmen was: the studio wanted to take it out of the 80s. He told us this back in October, but still felt like worth mentioning if we're going to list off all the hoops Snyder had to jump through just to get Watchmen where it is today. So the first edit he had to deal with was updating Watchmen to the 00s and the war on terror.

It would have been an updated George Bush-era film, where the Minutemen team had been hunting down terrorists. But Snyder's love for Nixon's Watchmen involvement brought him back to the table, asking Warner Brothers to trust him that 1985 is the right way to start the movie, and "maybe we should just leave it the way it is."

See, this is where I would have been fired as a director. The things I would have thrown in that meeting — truly Snyder has a long fuse, because it gets so much better. Next up the higher ups wanted to know if they could do away with all that silly back story, and just focus in on Rorschach and his quest to uncover Edward Blake's murderer. Snyder told us about this tricky battle recently, saying;

The funny thing is when we were ready to shoot we had updated the script to equal the storyboards it was about 160 pages just monstrous. They [the studio] said, well we've looked at the script and we've identified three areas where you can cut. The Comedian's funeral (you don't really need to do that), and they were like Manhattan goes to Mars (nothing happens there), and you don't need to interrogate Rorscach. You don't need to know anything about his back story.

So now they've cut out all the character depth what's next? Well, good should win in the end, right? So why not KILL ADRIAN VEIDT? According to Snyder;

They said, you could take those three sections out of the movie and you could have a nice tight little story. And I said, [makes a face] 'Yeah eeeeh ok.' Then [the studio continued on] 'You know what else troubles us. You've changed the ending again and Adrian lives? We really liked the old version where Dan like crashed the Owl ship and killed Adrian with it at the very end.' And I said, 'Yeah that's really not cool. That's like the opposite of the movie.' I kind of held off. I didn't trick 'em, but I did wait quite a while before I actually said, 'We can't have Adrian die at the end, it's impossible. It's like a superhero movie, then, and a bad one.'

...I don't guarantee you, but I would wager a lot, that if this movie had been done somewhere else or some other way, those are the exact things that wouldn't be in the movie.

I know we complain a lot as fans of the book, but seriously thank you Snyder. You clearly had to fight a lot of up hill battles, thanks for not letting this movie turn into this:

You can probably read The Watchmen Film Companion, from Titan Books, in an hour... if you don't get distracted by all the incredible art and photos. Pretty much every one of the book's 176 pages contains eye-popping images I haven't seen elsewhere.

Some of them are just brilliant-looking stills from the film, showing quite how nice all the imagery is. But they also include tons of storyboards, concept art, artists' renderings of the characters from the film and portrait photos of the characters. And most of all, tons and tons of easter eggs that you'll never spot in the film the first time around. Like that giant mural welcoming Vietnam as the 51st. state of the USA. Or Adrian Veidt's electric car and African famine relief campaign. I knew director Zack Snyder was detail-obsessed and OCD, but I still discovered extra layers of OCD-ness looking through this book.

Here are some of our favorite images among the hundreds in the book:

OMG, I just found an image of Silk Spectre I standing over Hitler with her boot on his back. It's sort of fetishy and awesome.

The book is a nice blend between a making-of book and a primer on the film for newbies. Writer Peter Aperlo divides the book into seven easy chapters. Three chapters deal with pre-production, production and post-production. Another chapter explains the world of Watchmen, and there's a separate chapter on the characters. Dr. Manhattan gets a chapter of his own as well. Pretty much anyone who reads this book will emerge with a high level of Watchmen geekery.

I thought I was oversaturated with Watchmen movie knowledge, but I still learned a lot from this book.

Aperlo explains how Snyder created his storyboards and art references, not only from the graphic novel but from tons of 1985-era photos. And it delves into the reasons for that title-sequence montage, which is intended to "force the audience to re-imagine the past by viewing it through a Watchmen lens." Also, I didn't realize before that the film production had considered shooting on one of the stock New York streets in Burbank, before building its own chunk of Manhattan in Vancouver. And did you know that one of the guys working on the Dr. Strangelove-inspired NORAD sequences had actually worked on Dr. Strangelove? Me neither.

Also interesting: Snyder explains why he insisted on shooting the movie in script order, rather than wildly out of order the way most movies are shot. And the section on post-production not only talks CG, sound and music, but also the way the film-makers tried to highlight little touches like the changes in Nite Owl II's face when he descends into brutality avenging the murder of Nite Owl I. (A scene that's not in the final cut, sadly.)

For the newbies, there's an actual chart showing the Wachmen timeline from the 1930s to the 1980s, including every little reference in the film. Seriously, it's insane. It compares the real-life history with the film's alternate history and includes relevant superhero stuff. And the book walks you through the history of superheroes in this world, including the earliest origins and the Keene Act. The character profiles include all the minor characters, like Captain Metropolis and the Knot-Tops, as well as everybody who gets even a moment of screen time in the film.

And there are insane quotes, like this one from Snyder: "You have anyone who's been alive in the 20th Century and observed pop culture. That person can also see in Watchmen the culmination of all the pop ideas of the 20th Century finally intersecting at nuclear war and super heroes and fast food and fucking."

Sweet Chariots And Segways:

Two things from the above Watchmen comic panel are completely missing in the movie. Yep, gone are Rorscach's pocket full of Sweet Chariot sugar cubes, and Nite Owl's sweet hover-board ride. Why do-away with the floating scooter? According to MTV Snyder snipped out the segways because:

I like that shot where you can see the Owl Ship, and you can pull back and see Karnak in the foreground..I wanted to have geography, for the audience to understand the distances. And also, when they approach Karnak, you can [now] see it as you approach. [Otherwise], it would be difficult for them to fly so far away. It would be some bad flying by the end.

As for losing the cubes, that was disappointing. There was so much attention paid in this movie, perhaps somewhere out there someone can show me a screencap of a bag of Chariots lumped in the corner at Dan's house. It's just one of those fun little quirks I'm sad to see go. But its omission was probably in part to the removal of Detective Steven Fine and Detective Joe Bourquin from the plot. Which leads us to our next cut.

Fine And Bourquin - Blink And You'll Miss 'Em:

Back in October, Snyder shared with us that the two detectives on the hunt for Edward Blakes murderer, who enjoy putting old Dan Dreiberg under pressure, had to be axed almost completely:

The whole detective story - those two detectives that are trying to figuring out why these people are killing each other - those are the things we had to leave out. Although you do see them in the movie, just not their whole story.

But luckily for audience members the two gum shoes have a bit of banter in the opening scene, and yes they're wearing their respective coats.

The Original Nite Owl Never Gets His On-Camera Goodbye:

The biggest, and most upsetting, surprise for me was the omission of Hollis Mason's death from the movie. I was beyond shocked that this brutally graphic scene was completely cut from the film, and it was the first thing I asked Zack Snyder about:

There are some things that we had to cut out of the theatrical version that were painful for me, like Hollis' death. I don't know if you know. It's one of my favorite scenes in the movie, to be honest. But it came out without destroying the movie. Anything else, when we were at that point, it was like a house of cards.

But according to Zack, it's in the Director's Cut of the film which will not only be released in July on DVD, but may also get a limited theatrical release as well. The Director's Cut stands at 3 hours and 10 minutes. And while that's all fine and dandy, cutting this scene rips out a lot of the heart from the film, especially from those who haven't read the book. Why introduce Stephen McHattie as Nite Owl and make him a soft and cuddly old retired Minute Man for no real reason? The people needed to see him bludgeoned to death by the top-knots because it demonstrated just how horrific and tense the streets were had become - sorry, the Doomsday Clock and headlines alone just don't demonstrate the stressed out terror people are faced with.

Laurie's Gone Cold Turkey:

We mentioned before that Warner Brothers forced Laurie Juspeczyk to put down her pipe. Sadly, it was just one move that Snyder couldn't override, even though he was sad about it. Well, we're sad about it too. That little smoke demonstrated a lot of her character's flighty personality as she jumped on and off the wagon. It's a shame it had to go - every time Laurie would swear off the cancer sticks, then run back to her comforting puffs, made her feel more human and imperfect. You could sympathize with the poor girl. If she's having this much trouble quitting smoking, the rest of her major life decision-making must be a disaster. Sorry to see it go, but man if it was in there, Malin Akerman would have been lighting up quite a bit.

The Black Freighter:
Don't go in expecting to see a raft made up of bodies and one dead shark, because the pirate adventure just couldn't fit into this film, which is why it's being released as an animation on DVD on March 24th. Interesting side note, the animated special is voiced by Gerard Butler. Until then, you'll have to make do with the trailer.

Bye Bye, Side Characters:
If you're excited to watch the coming together of man and stranger with the Watchmen ceremonial newspaper fella hat pass, forget it. Everyone at the news stand has been cut. Sure there are glimpses of the side characters here and there, but they are quick and fleeting. But Snyder promises more from Bernie and other newsstand customers in the Black Freighter DVD and Director's Cut.

It's he and the newsstand kid mainly. The top knots are there knocking around [and] getting mad. They don't like it that he's reading the comic book. There are little bits where Hollis Mason is buying a magazine. We have characters from the book pass through the news stand to make it feel like a community of characters.

But sadly when you watch of sea of faces blasted apart in the end, you don't really care because you don't know who any of them are, or whose hat they're wearing.

That Tandoori Chicken Never Gets Delivered:

We've discussed the impact 9/11 had on the Watchmen before. But changing the ending to omit all of the dead bodies due to studio or personal issues also meant we lost all of the dialogue from Laurie, where she tried to come to grips with the horror in front of her. This decision also cut out one of the best lines from the book, in my opinion, about people stepping out for Tandoori chicken and then getting vaporized.

The Real Victim Of Watchmen's Ending Is The Burgers n' Borscht Franchise:

Since the ending was jerryrigged around leaving out the poor misunderstood squid, changes had to be made. Without revealing too much of the ending, let's just say NYC isn't the only city that comes under fire. Which means no Russian/American blended fast food joints, and I think the people of this alternate reality are really the ones losing out on this deal.

A slight digression: Around 1993, I was taking a lot of international relations classes, taught in some cases by actual analysts with the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Dept. And the thing my fellow students and I kept asking was, "Was everybody out of their mind?" Recounting the whole crazy history of the Cold War, all the misjudgments and myths that were accepted as facts, it seemed like everyone had been living in a dream. And this was only a handful of years after the Berlin Wall fell. I'd even visited the USSR, in 1991.

And yet, the Cold War might as well have been the middle ages - it was incomprehensible that we'd been that close to destroying ourselves, for so long, over faulty intel, clashing ideologies and heaps of paranoia.

I bring this up because that feeling of alienation from the Cold War, that I and my fellow students felt in 1993, came back to me strongly while watching Watchmen. And I think the movie evokes that feeling semi-consciously, even as it sabotages any possibility of compelling story-telling.

As almost anyone reading this knows, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons published Watchmen back in 1985, and it revolutionized superhero comics forever. I re-read a chunk of my copy the other night, and had to force myself to stop reading and get to sleep. Even 24 years later, the graphic novel sizzles with narrative energy, and the characters crawl into your head and poke the inside of your skull.

In the movie, as in the comic, it's an alternate version of 1985, where superheroes are real. As a result, the U.S. won the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon won reelection - several times. He's in his fifth term in 1985, and meanwhile masked vigilantes have been outlawed. Now, as the world creeps closer to the spectre of nuclear war, someone is getting costumed heroes out of the way - starting with the biggest bastard of them all, the Comedian. The second biggest bastard, Rorschach, is determined to investigate, but the trail leads him to a mind-bogglingly huge conspiracy.

The movie version of Watchmen has a Herculean task: It has to sell us on this alternate history of the United States. It has to introduce us to these deeply flawed superhero characters - with their flaws highlighted - and yet somehow make us care about them. And it has to do something the graphic novel did not: put us in the mid-1980s "mutually assured destruction" mindset. You can see the film laboring valiantly to do all of these things, but especially the last. There are many, many conversations about nuclear destruction in this movie, especially towards the end.

And yet, the movie seems to suggest that maybe we shouldn't care about the possibility of nuclear holocaust after all. We hear this viewpoint a lot from the Dr. Manhattan, the detached scientist-turned-blue-god, but all of the movie's characters express a form of nihilism one way or another. Humans, we're told, are venal and self-destructive, and utterly doomed. Our existence (as the Comedian puts it) is a joke, and we're all crazy.

That's the weird thing about Watchmen, the film. After a couple of decades since the Berlin Wall, and years of superhero movies, a guy wearing an inkblot mask to beat up criminals seems more sane than Mutually Assured Destruction. We understand superheroes and costumed asskickers, but we no longer understand Henry Kissinger. The film struggles with this - and winds up showing how both superhero violence and Robert McNamara-style brinksmanship are insane and pointlessly destructive. They're both expressions of the same ego-driven narcissistic world-saving project.

And maybe that's why the film feels so empty, even as it serves up amazing visuals and trippy ideas. A lot of the film is stunning to look at, and the many of the most audacious ideas from Moore's writing are there, front and center, without any dilution. Dr. Manhattan's crazy physics talk, the Comedian's brutality and jolly misogyny, Rorschach's ravings... it's all in there. And I kept being startled, over and over again, by how much of this stuff is still just as batshit 24 years later, and how amazing it is that Snyder put it into a movie.

Seriously, just try to imagine a movie featuring half as many insane ideas and clever touches as this film packs in, a movie with a physicist who becomes blue, bald, naked and aware of the unity of past, present and future. A movie where sociopaths carry a lot of the narrative. A movie where Nixon and Kissinger are like a Greek chorus to the crazy action. I knew all this stuff was in the movie, but I still kept getting amazed when I saw it. And a lot of it works amazingly well, in large part thanks to Snyder's vivid eye.

And yet... instead of feeling immediate and in-your-face, all of this brilliant stuff feels like it's happening a million miles away, to people you heard of a long time ago. It really is true that Watchmen feels stiff, and dead, especially after the brash first half hour or so.

Sadly, most of the performances in the film left me cold - with two notable exceptions. Whenever Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach) or Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian) are on screen, the movie wakes up and suddenly becomes ferociously watchable. The rest of the time, it flatlines. Malin Akerman, in particular, is mannequin-esque as Laurie Juspeczyk/Silk Spectre II, and fails to sell her character's crucial arc in coming to terms with her parents. But Matthew Goode is also dull as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, and Patrick Wilson seems too a little too aw-shucks as Nite Owl.

I know Zack Snyder is capable of making me care about a narrative, because I was totally pulled in to his previous film, 300, despite my misgivings. I ended up totally rooting for Leonidas and cheering for his rampage. So the absence of emotional engagement, here, feels almost like a deliberate choice on his part.

Snyder, meanwhile, is obsessed with creating beautiful tableaux... and then lingering on them. Almost every shot of the movie is a still life, with the camera either stationary or panning slowly. Either because Snyder has succeeded in duplicating a panel from the comic, or because he's managed to create a lovely set of images on his own, he wants to show off each moment. (This is what DVDs and pause buttons are for, honestly.) The movie's many fight sequences, meanwhile, feel a bit endless and borrow a lot from the first Matrix stylistically. The comic-panel-on-screen motif that worked so well in Sin City is in full effect, and it's absolutely gorgeous but feels leaden this time around.

(I think this movie will be fantastic if you watch it on DVD with the sound muted, and put on some classic rock. Actually, that's another problem with the film — it sounds like a minor complaint, but the soundtrack is a little too heavily weighted to 60s folk-rock. I know the graphic novel quotes Bob Dylan a couple times, but it also quotes Elvis Costello, who would have been a welcome presence.)

But it's really in the last 45 minutes that the film uninvites the audience to care. Around the time that Rorschach triumphs over his great challenge in the film, and Dr. Manhattan is trying to decide whether to abandon the human race to its fate - I'm being deliberately a bit vague - the film descends into talkiness. I'm not one of those people who holds the graphic novel sacred, but when the movie cuts out Moore's crowning absurdity from the comic, there's nothing to take its place but jargon and blather. The movie's final act is all about abstractions. Much like Cold War statesmanship, actually.

Snyder has insisted that even though his Watchmen movie is about an alternate 1985, it's commenting, subtly, on what's happening in the world today. And thinking about it, I think I can see what he means. Once you realize that the Cold War and the domino theory and all that other stuff was just a mass hallucination, you start to question our current paranoias, like the War on Terror.

I'm going to be pondering this movie for years, and trying to figure out how a film can be so visually compelling, so conceptually ambitious, and so true to one of the greatest pieces of art of our lifetimes... and yet, feel so deathly dull.

For now, though, I suspect it's really one of those instances where style and substance collide. Snyder has made the ultimate nihilistic movie, in which you stare into nothingness... and feel nothing. It's a movie everyone should see - including people who haven't read the graphic novel - but I'm not sure you'll actually enjoy it.

Writes the New Yorker's Anthony Lane:

The bad news about "Watchmen" is that it grinds and squelches on for two and a half hours, like a major operation. The good news is that you don't have to stay past the opening credit sequence-easily the highlight of the film.

If you think that's harsh, look at New York Magazine's take:

Alan Moore refused (in advance) to put his name on the movie, which must have hurt Snyder and company terribly; they've made the most reverent adaptation of a graphic novel ever. But this kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.

Newsweek's Devin Gordon goes even further, hinting that the fanboys who now praise Watchmen may eventually come to view it as another Phantom Menace.

Says EW's Owen Gleiberman:

Watchmen isn't boring, but as a fragmented sci-fi doomsday noir, it remains as detached from the viewer as it is from the zeitgeist.

And perhaps harshest of all, AP's Christy Lemire taunts the fanboys who may love this movie:

Hey, fanboys. Yeah, you guys, the ones who flooded my inbox with e-mails after I trashed Zack Snyder's "300," wishing birth defects on my unborn children and suggesting that perhaps my husband isn't - ahem - keeping me satisfied.

Yes, I've read "Watchmen." I understand why it matters culturally, why it's considered revolutionary in its exploration of flawed superheroes, why it moved you. It moved me, too. And still - or, rather, because of that - I found director Snyder's adaptation hugely disappointing, faithful as it is to the graphic novel.

And meanwhile, the movie blogs and nerd outlets are ecstatic over the same film that's causing so much pain to New York Magazine.

Says Ain't It Cool News:

I WATCHED THE FUCKING WATCHMEN AND FUCKING LOVED IT! It isn't the perfect 5 hour wet dream that I always dreamt of, but I love it. I can't wait to see the dialogue you all have with this film, with each other and with us here at AICN. This was fucking awesome!

Says CHUD:

If nothing else, Zack Snyder's Watchmen demands praise as an awe-inspiring achievement... It's a remarkable film, and an uncompromising one. It's the sort of movie that major studios are simply not supposed to be making now that the 1970s are over... A glorious, epic, exciting, mind blowing piece of art.

According to Cinemablend:

As a movie Watchmen is every bit as risky, edgy, and aspiring as it ought to be. As a bonus it's also really, really good.

UGO:

On many levels, Watchmen is a masterpiece. Visually striking from its first to last frame, Snyder's adaptation, in my opinion, even surpasses the source material.

(Although the review goes on to point out a lot of problems in the film, but then winds up saying it's basically great.)

The blog response isn't unanimous. JoBlo gives the movie a lukewarm review, for example. (My own Watchmen review will be up tomorrow, when I've had time to ponder it. Suffice to say, for now, both the New Yorker and Ain't It Cool News are right.)

We don't want to spoil the movie for those of you who haven't read the book, but there may be somethings that you need - or want - to know before you head to the theaters on Friday (or Thursday night, if you're very excited). So here are nine questions that you just might want some answers to, just in case. Click through to learn more.

What Is Watchmen?
Who Are The Watchmen?
Why Is Watchmen So Important?
Why Was Watchmen Supposed To Be Unfilmable?
Where Does It Take Place?
Who's The Giant Blue Guy?
What's With Characters With "II" After Their Names, Like Nite Owl II And Silk Spectre II?
What Is Tales of The Black Freighter, Anyway?
What's This About A Squid? (Spoilers, No, Seriously.)

The one question we're not answering yet? Whether we think you should go and see the movie... You'll have to wait for our review, coming early next week, for that one.

There's a lot of tension in the air over whether or not actor Jackie Earle Haley can master the guttural voice and subtle menace of Rorschach. But I think that if Snyder and Haley can make this running, jumping and leaping clip of Rorschach scary - well then, we don't need to worry about the actual ass-kicking, dog-killing part.

Watchmen will be in theaters March 6.

Talking to the audience at MTV, Snyder fielded a question about how his movie changes the graphic novel's loony giant-squid-from-space ending:

"There is a couple of things, I think, interesting about the ending," Snyder explained to our audience, making reference to the giant alien monster he removed from Moore's story. "One, if you want to know about the squid - well, he makes a small appearance. If you notice, [Dr. Manhattan's] reactor is actually called the Sub Quantum Unifying Intrinsic Device. You see that sign [with the S.Q.U.I.D. acronym] if you look carefully in Adrian's [lair]; it's in the consoles, and it's also behind the thing when it gets teleported.

So there is a squid in the film, it's just a bit more metaphorical than before. (Looks like Snyder mentioned something similar to CHUD last week.) And he explained more fully why the actual, corporeal squid had to go:

The reason that the squid got taken out of the movie was so there'd be more Rorschach and a little bit more Manhattan. Because we did the math, and we figured it took about 15 minutes to explain [the squid's appearance] correctly; otherwise, it's pretty crazy.

And here's that clip, which is pretty exciting and dynamic, and yet totally stylized in a way that reminds me of Grindhouse:

[MTV Splashpage]

Don't get me wrong; I don't actually want the movie to fail, and actually expect it not to, at least in the short term. If nothing else, the ridiculous success of The Dark Knight has definitively proven that a mainstream audience exists for what, for want of a better term, could be called "Arthouse Superhero" movies (Something that had been hinted at before; I tend to think of Tim Burton's Batman Returns and Sam Raimi's last two Spider-Man movies - in particular Spider-Man 3, with its jazz interludes and weird uneven tone - as earlier examples of superhero auteurism), and Watchmen's intense, endless marketing campaign is definitely aiming for that level of gravity, with mentions of a "visionary director" adapting "the most celebrated graphic novel of all time." What I'm worried about, though, is what the marketing isn't saying, and what effect that could have on the Arthouse Superhero genre moving forward.

From what we've seen of Watchmen so far - and I write this as someone who hasn't seen the movie, although I've talked to people who have - we know that they're trying to be faithful to the look of the book, at least; the trailers show glossy CGI-massaged scenes that we recognize from Dave Gibbons' original drawings, and many comparisons have been made between movie stills and comic panels. It seems, at times, that this is the drive of the entire marketing for the movie: Look how much it resembles the comic! Look at how much detail we have copied over, even down to the dedication on the Comedian's gun! The trailers, in fact, are much less about the story of the film than a collection of fan-familiar images meant to make the faithful fans get excited with recognition and warm with the glow of nostalgia. But the problem with that is, in many ways, the visuals are the least important thing about Watchmen the book.

For all of the claims that Watchmen the book was unfilmable, very few of them centered around the kind of special effects needed to make us believe a man could explode and then re-create himself as a glowing blue naked go (In fact, shitty special effects may even have been more in tune with the arch-knowingness of the original book that both acknowledged and transcended its pulpy, ridiculous roots). No, what would make Watchmen unfilmable - and what the trailers and the arcade game-style web extras and the released scenes with too much slow-mo and the black and white portraits od actors and everything we've seen from the film so far have failed to show us is in evidence in the movie - is the deftness of Alan Moore's writing, which manages to balance a formal exploration of the comic medium with a complex, flawed humanity that looks "behind the hood" of the characters to make them into real people who would look ridiculous in those outfits... and not as Batman Begins-esque as the movie's Nite Owl. Of these two things, one is literally impossible to translate to another medium, and the other would seem to be nearly impossible to fit within a three-hour movie, no matter what you may feel about Zack Snyder's talents as a director.

I can't help but feel that it's this potential misdirection - that the truly important elements of Watchmen the book have been ignored or lost, and instead we're seeing the movie being sold on how much it looks like the comic - that will be the downfall of the movie, ultimately. It strikes me as foolish to try and promote the movie to fans on how faithful it is visually, when the heart of the book will be missing, and to non-fans, the mainstream audience that made Dark Knight such a massive hit, the faithfulness will have no meaning without the original context; all they're seeing are a bunch of colorful characters and explosions and being told it's a big deal.

It's that mainstream audience that all of the hype should have been geared towards; the very idea of a Watchmen movie would be enough to anger and excite the hardcore fanbase in and of itself, and while all of the promotional pandering has been welcomed, it won't change the final outcome, which is that Watchmen the movie will almost definitely disappoint them. That's not a comment on the quality of the final movie, but on the expectations those fans have for it; after almost a year of hype and previewed footage and interviews and seeing the Owlship at San Diego Comic-Con, there is almost no way in the world that any movie can live up to the one that they've created in their minds (A movie that will, undoubtedly, include the squid at the end). You can almost taste the backlash now. Better to have spent the time, and the money, selling everyone else on the movie, and hope that they understand and embrace whatever it turns out to be.

And what happens if it DOES fail? In one sense, very little; more mainstream superhero movies like Thor and Avengers will most likely be unaffected in terms of box office, although they may find more snark thrown their way by critics stung by wanting to fall for Watchmen more than they actually did, perhaps. I think that, if audiences don't love the movie to Dark Knight levels, then that won't affect their desire to see Robert Downey Jr. wisecrack his way through another 90 minutes while wearing armor; they may not even see any real connection between the two movies. But what I'm worried about is what it'll mean for movies that aren't summer blockbusters based on well-known comic book franchises. Will The Dark Knight start to be looked at, not as a sign of things to come, but a fluke that shows that audiences only really want to watch self-important superheroes when they grew up with them? Will movie producers shy away from projects that aim for epic grandeur and high budgets, because Watchmen suggests that that kind of thing scares people away? Will Billy Crudup's career survive?

Okay, maybe I don't really care about that last one so much. Sorry, Billy.

There's a lot resting on the success of Watchmen, I think; not just Fox's ability to point at Warners and laugh and say that they were right in the first place to pass on the project (and then, you know, sue just in case), but in a strange sense, it's managed - through force of marketing as much as anything - to become the First Post-Dark Knight-Era Important Superhero Movie. If it succeeds, then the door may be open to more and more ambitious science fiction movies (whether based on comics or not). But if it fails, then maybe we'll end up with a movie industry that thinks that Transformers and X-Men Origins: Wolverine is all that genre movies should aspire to... And that's a much greater tragedy than losing a giant alien squid for your climax.