New Watchmen Movie Announced

07/22/2023 10:24 am EDT

DC Studios has announced an animated Watchmen movie during San Diego Comic-Con. During the company's panel, they showed off the adaptation of the classic graphic novel alongside a version of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Both of these came as a surprise for attendees. Watchmen last got seen on the small screen as a part of the HBO miniseries that garnered heavy acclaim. There's no word from DC Studios on how they'll approach Watchmen the time around. It could be a straight-up adaptation of the books. Or, it could be a sequel series somewhere down the road from the events in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' beloved tome.

Of course, the Internet is handling the news with GIFs of "Watchmen Babies" from The Simpsons and other jokes about yet another spinoff of the popular graphic novel. Moore famously doesn't like his name to be acknowledged in print of any new copies of Watchmen. Gibbons is a little more lax on the matter. This push and pull became even more apparent during the HBO run of the show. Showrunner Damon Lindelof wrote Moore an impassioned letter about what the book meant to him and the two didn't see eye to eye on how to handle the show.

 Will The TV Show Ever Come Back?

Watchmen was a huge hit for HBO as it won awards and captured the zeitgeist week after week. However, Lindelof and the creative team left the series with an ambiguous ending. While some fans wanted a season 2, it seems clear that the showrunner never intended for that reality at al. HBO Max (at that time) head Casey Bloys talked to Variety about the program and if it would ever return. The executive had to admit it would be tough to make anymore without the unifying vision of the showrunner. Here's what he had to say!

"Watchmen was so much his creation," Bloys told Variety. "If he doesn't think there's a story that he wants to put his heart and soul into, it's hard for me to think that it would be worth doing. It was a very special limited series for us. I would put it in the pantheon of HBO greats. If Damon ever wants to revisit it, he knows that it's an open door. But it is hard for me to imagine doing one without him."

Alan Moore Addresses The Watchmen TV Show

Alan Moore spoke to GQ about the letter he received from Damon Lindelof about participating in the Watchmen TV show for HBO. To say that the co-creator is not pleased would be something of an understatement. The writer was a little bit put off from the introduction to the letter and it only expanded from there. "Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen," the co-creator joked that it "wasn't the best opener."

Moore continued, "It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling. 'Can you at least tell us how to pronounce 'Ozymandias'?' I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I'd thought that Warner Brothers were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn't contact me again for any reason. I explained that I had disowned the work in question, and partly that was because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work, but which would be associated with it in the public mind. I said, 'Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don't want anything to do with you or your show. Please don't bother me again.'"

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