I have been waiting for a Watchmen movie for almost fifteen years and today it’s happening. Even the knowledge that the movie cannot live up to fifteen years of anticipation probably won’t stop me from being disappointed at one thing or another.

This post has two major parts. If you’re interested in comic books or comic book movies generally, read the first part. If you’re interested in the Watchmen in particular, read the second.

It’s hard to say for sure. It depends in part on how good the movie is and whether Word of Mouth spreads like it did for Iron Man. I have my doubts, though. Comic book films do not succeed and fail on the basis of comic book fans. Non-fans (and casual fans) are typically looking for something different than fans are. Watchmen appeals more to the latter group than the former.

Who who knows? My intent isn’t to answer the question. We’ll find out soon enough. The intent is to stress its importance of the answer.

Movie-goers tend to really like comic book movies and critics generally don’t. Or, at the least, critics are tired of them. Superhero movies can be rather formulaic. Some movies perfect the formula or bend it a bit in the right way and are good while others are simply by-the-numbers tedium or aggresively awful.

I agree with the critics in that I would like to see move movies that do different things with the genres. Bend it further as they do in the comic books themselves. Expand it to characters that aren’t name properties with which the writers have more freedom. I would love to see a movie about The Authority, to pick an example.

Unfortunately, the more expensive the movie the more people it needs to appeal to and the less flexibility the directors have. Superhero movies tend to be expensive. If Watchmen fails, the clear message is that you need to be making the movie with a name property or follow the formula spectacularly. The best we can hope for at that point are low-budget movies and shows in the vein of the Darkman sequels. Or maybe animated movies. Even if The Watchmen succeeds in something short of an extraordinary fashion, we probably won’t even get that. A lot of its success will be attributed to the popularity of its source material.

It’s supposed to be very faithful to the comic book with the exception of the ending which supposedly needed to be revamped for different times.

I am frankly a bit suspicious of “revamping for the times”, to be honest. Though I liked the V for Vendetta that came out a few years ago, almost every contemporization was more a distraction than helpful. I thought that they did a good job of killing the subplots that weren’t necessary and creating a good flow. I mostly think that the efforts to make it more “socially relevent” (putting in pieces to let people know, “Psssst, we’re talking about Bush!”) make it so that it will date faster than the source material did, which didn’t feel dated even though I read it a decade or so after it was written.

Watchmen, ironically, would feel less dated today than when I did read it. It’s essentially a Cold War story and the Cold War had been won by the time I read it. Now, with the War on Terror and everybody quite a bit more anxious about things, it takes on a new resonance. Even though the graphic novel is still in an alternate 1986. I am really hoping that they don’t make it about the WoT with plants as unsubtle as V for Vendetta.

Then again, I haven’t read as much about the movie as other people have because I want to be more surprised. So maybe I misheard something and the ending revamp was because the original ending is too 9-11ish or somesuch. Seven years later, that would be pretty lame. But artistically it might result in a better movie than contemporization.

As concerned as I am about their decision to deviate from the source, I am also concerned about their loyalty to it. The Watchmen is already a pretty dense work in twelve comics. Trying to fit the whole thing in to three hours could lead to whiplash.

An example would be a couple audio adaptations I’ve listened to on my commute, Superman Lives and The Knightfall Saga. Particularly Knightfall. They did an amazing job of fitting just about everything relevent into three hours of audio, but the result that there was so much happening so quickly that you never got time to actually care about what was going to happen. When Azrael commented that it had been almost a year since he met Batman, I wanted to yell “Dude, it’s been less than two hours!”

The good news is that Knightfall was trying to fit material from 60 or so comics into three hours while Watchmen has 12 to fit into the same timeframe. Also, The Watchmen comic book is slower-paced, which might give them more opportunity. On the other hand, Watchmen is also celebrated in part due to its depth and re-readability, a lot of which is necessarily glided over in film.

All that being said, in a sense I don’t care if the movie is the inevitable disappointment I figure it to be. And if it’s going to fall short, I prefer it do so faithfully. Just having many of the individual scenes put up there to film will make the whole exercise worthwhile to me.

Probably not to Warner Bros, who is probably going to take a bath on this.