Zack Snyder Once Shared He Wanted to Kill Superhero Movies With His 2009 Film ‘Watchmen’
Man of Steel wasn’t the only film adapted from DC Comics that Zack Snyder directed. Before helming the DCEU, Snyder had experience adapting superheroes with 2009’s Watchmen.
Apart from being a fan of the graphic novel the film was based on, Snyder had another motivation for making the movie. He believed Watchmen could kill the superhero genre as movie audiences knew it.
Zack Snyder made ‘Watchmen’ to save it from other filmmakers ruining the movie
A film adaptation of Alan Moore’s 1986 iconic graphic novel Watchmen had been considered long before Zack Snyder got his hands on it. Despite other interested parties, the Army of the Dead filmmaker felt he could be the one to make a faithful adaptation of Moore’s work.
“It is challenging, and I have to say that if I can crack Watchmen it would be awesome for everybody. I just don’t think that Hollywood, in general, has any idea what Watchmen is,” Snyder once said according to Superhero Hype.
But another motivation for tackling Watchmen was to keep it away from other filmmakers who risked making a poor adaptation. Speaking to HuffPost, Snyder discussed how interested filmmakers like Terry Gilliam might not have been the right fit for Watchmen. If Snyder didn’t step in, however, the movie could’ve ended up in the wrong hands.
“I just love the movie and it was a labor of love. And I made it because I knew that the studio would have made the movie anyway and they would have made it crazy. So, finally I made it to save it from the Terry Gilliams of this world,” Snyder said.
According to Snyder, Gilliam had even written an ending for his version of Watchmen that he felt would’ve upset audiences.
“The fans would have been thinking that they were smoking crack,” Snyder’s wife, Deborah Snyder, said of Gilliam’s ending.
Zack Snyder wanted to kill superhero films with ‘Watchmen’
In an interview with the LA Times, Snyder quipped that Watchmen was going to be the end of superhero films.
“We’re killing the comic-book movie, we’re ending it,” he said. “This movie is the last comic-book movie, for good or bad.”
The Dawn of the Dead director believed his Watchmen came out at a perfect time when superhero films were abundant in cinema. This allowed Snyder to play with the genre in a way he didn’t think was possible before.
“Twenty years ago my parents wouldn’t know who the X-Men were, and now everybody knows that stuff,” Snyder said. “It means that deconstruction of the superhero is something you can do. All those movies have led to a point where we can finally have Watchmen with a Superman character who doesn’t want to save the world and a Batman who has trouble in bed. Essentially, I want to kill the superhero movie because now we can.”
Zack Snyder didn’t think a ‘Watchmen’ TV series would work
HBO recently adapted Moore’s Watchmen series with Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen TV series starring Regina King. Although considered a success, years ago Snyder didn’t believe a Watchmen TV show would’ve been possible. In a video on Reddit, Snyder explained the major hurdle a Watchmen show had to overcome.
“This is a question that’s been brought up a lot, like, oh, this should be an HBO miniseries or whatever, and I think that’s cool,” Snyder said. “But there’s no version of this miniseries where you have a version of Manhattan like [the Watchmen movie]. Each shot of him would be your budget for the episode of the show.”
