Ever since Watchmen came out we’ve heard tale of an “ultimate cut” that would offer fans the TOTAL Watchmen experience, including the full-length director’s cut of the movie, with the added bonus of having animated segments from the Tales of the Black Freighter tie-in film spliced in with the live-action footage, much in the same vein as was done in the original Watchmen graphic novel.

Back in July we gave you some early details about the extras Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut would offer, but now you can find out for yourself as this super-special edition is slated to hit stores everywhere next week!

The nominees have been announced for the fourth annual Scream Awards, held every year by Spike TV. The decisively more “fan-friendly” award ceremony (compared to the Oscars) honors films from the sci-fi, fantasy, horror and comic-book genres of movies, TV shows and comic books. The awards are described as, “the first and only global event of its kind,” to honor those genres.

The Scream 2009 nominees were chosen by the Advisory Board of Hollywood and Genre Leaders, a list which this year includes the likes of Wes Craven, Roland Emmerich, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Eli Roth and Zack Snyder, plus many more. The event will be taped on Saturday, October 17th this year at The Greek Theater in Los Angeles, and will air on Spike TV ten days later on Tuesday, October 27th (check for local times).

Along with the awards, the show will also be airing some exclusive, world premiere of footage of some of the most anticipated movies of 2010! Presenters and musicians for the event are to be announced shortly.

Producer Joel Silver (The Matrix Trilogy) recently gave an interview at the premiere of The Good Son Orphan, in which he talked about how he would’ve done Watchmen differently (read: better) than director Zack Snyder did.

Now, we at Screen Rant are not trying to start any fire where there is no smoke: Silver was NOT condemning either Watchmen or Snyder as a filmmaker – rather he was simply stating what his creative vision was for the film and how it was different from Snyder’s slavish recreation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original graphic novel.

If you’re interested to hear about the movie that would’ve been Joel Silver’s Watchmen, keep reading.

So for some time now Watchmen director Zack Snyder has been saying there would be two versions of Watchmen released on DVD/Blu-ray: a directors cut, featuring the full-length version of Watchmen not shown in theaters, as well as an “ultimate edition” of the film, which would include the full-lentgh film interwoven with the animated Tales of the Black Freighter side-story, just like in the original graphic novel.

After learning that Watchmen: The Director’s Cut will be coming to DVD/Blu-ray (and three movie theaters) this month, we now have the first details of what Watchmen: Ultimate Collector’s Edition will be all about, as well as a highly-anticipated deleted scene from the full-length film: Check out the death of Nite Owl!

Merrick over at Ain’t It Cool News has a reader named “Ulysses” who reportedly has seen Watchmen: The Director’s Cut, which is set for release on Blu-ray this month, and even a limited run in theaters.

So what’s new in Watchmen: The Director’s Cut? Keep on reading if you want to know the answer to that question, but needless to say, anything you read is going to be a SPOILER.

Collider recently had a chance to speak with Watchmen director Zack Snyder at a Warner Bros. promotional event for the 300 and Watchmen: The Director’s Cut Blu-rays. After the event, Collider had a chance to sit down with Snyder and talk a little bit about Watchmen.

The big reveal: Watchmen: The Director’s Cut will be getting a limited theatrical release this July! After all the debate about whether Snyder’s film was a fantastic achievement or a flaming disaster, Watchmen fans (or those still on the fence) will have a chance to get the full experience that Snyder intended – that is, if they live in the right city.

A while back, director Zack Snyder promised fans that the DVD/Blu-ray versions of Watchmen were going to be packed with extras, including a director’s cut of film which would run almost thirty minutes longer than the theatrical version.

Well, The Blu-Ray Blog has gotten hold of the details regarding the forthcoming release of the Watchmen Director’s Cut Blu-ray. For those who still care are keeping track, feel free to take a look and see how closely the Watchmen Blu-ray is living up to Snyder’s promise.

In this Weeks spell check busting installment: Matthew McConaughey is an Exchange Student; Heffalump writer Spiliotopoulos will write Bekmambetov’s Wanted 2 – will Angelina Jolie be involved? Megan Fox is Crossing over; John Carter of Mars is Chabon and which one of the Watchmen has Morning Glory for Star Trek’s Abram?

Hot off the heels of co-writing Watchmen, Alex Tse has just been signed on to adapt the upcoming graphic novel Battling Boy. The source material was written and illustrated by Paul Pope back in November and it’s about the son of a god who is sent down by his father from the top of a mountain to rid the giant city of Monstropolis of a plague of beasts.

The rights were recently picked up by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, and the film will be co-produced by Paramount Pictures. This is only part of an overall deal between the two companies to bring a slate of adaptations to the big-screen including Eat, Pray, Love (directed by Ryan Murphy), The Killer, The Black Hole (both David Fincher projects) and World War Z (set to be directed by Quantum of Solace helmer Marc Forster).

Although certainly not a box office failure, Zack Snyder’s graphic novel adaptation Watchmen did perform a lot worse than people were hoping and expecting. It had a solid but not-as-good-as-it-could-have-been $55MM opening weekend, dropped by almost 70% in its second weekend, and a month later it has only made $104MM in the US ($172MM worldwide).

Was it the R-rating? The 160-plus minute runtime? The violence? The hard efforts of Snyder to keep close to the source material at every point and turn (some would say far too closely)?

We’ll never know for sure.

This week:

Monsters Vs Aliens tops the box office; the Coens remake John Wayne’s True Grit; Val Kilmer talks up a reteam with Robert Downey Jr; Matthew McConaughey is The Lincoln Lawyer; Tobey Maguire knows The Limit; Ben Affleck and Matt Damon hunt for Good Will after Bourne again and Affleck hits The Town.

It’s Sunday and therefore it’s Wrap Up time. This week:

We Know who is top of the box office; Cage and Bruckheimer make a date; Beatty fights over Dick Tracy; George Lucas’s Red Tails gets Wild(s); get ready for Demonkeeper; Segal meets Little Fockers and Universal knows the Rites of Men.

By now it’s a proven statistic: on a long enough timeline, the probability of something you love being ripped a new one by South Park is 100%.

Well, last night it was comic book movie-lovers’ turn to get it, as the newest episode of South Park’s thirteenth season, “The Coon,” took aim at the recent trend of “dark” comic book films like Watchmen and The Dark Knight and lampooned away.

The result was, of course, pretty funny.

Watchmen co-screenwriter David Hayter recently put out an open letter urging people to see the movie again. The short and paraphrased version of what he said was that people need to go see more movies like Watchmen to show the powers that be that this is the type of quality material we want projected onto our local movie theater screens.

I really hope people do exactly what he urged – although by the film’s extremely disheartening 67% box-office drop in its second weekend, it looks like the fans Hayter was addressing haven’t taken his advice quite yet. Here’s hoping that if Watchmen leaves theaters before people decide to go and see it again, that a lot of support gets shown for it once it hits DVD/Blu-ray in the hopefully near future.

Well the totals are in, and Watchmen is nowhere near to being the box office smash many of us expected it to be.

After a solid $55 million opening weekend, Watchmen suffered a 67% second week drop-off, earning just $18 million for a total two-week domestic gross of $86 million (approx $112 million worldwide). Those earnings are far short of Watchmen’s reported $120 million budget, not to mention the astronomical cost of a marketing campaign so intense it seemed like Rorschach was making a run for The White House.

Now that Watchmen is in real danger of being a box office flop, it’s time to ask the hard question: has Watchmen’s underperformance killed “comic book movies?”

This Week:

We watch the Watchmen’s grosses; Ben Stiller leaves family comedy behind with Greenberg; Brendan Fraser returns to The Center Of The Earth; Vance joins Fraser and Harrison Ford in Crowley; Mickey Rourke has Passion and The Strangers become familiar.

Well, I have never been an out of work actress with a very famous roommate. However, I am oftentimes an out of work writer, and if the person I lived with was in Watchmen I’d totally give up writing to help exploit their career for a quick buck.

Besides, the world needs fanboys and fanboys need motivation to pursue their quests (whatever they may be), so this one is for the fanboys, in honor of the lengths to which they’ll go to in order to support something.  Even if that includes paying someone’s roommate to watch them sleep or shower.

Thanks to the most excellent Titan Books we ran a contest for some cool Watchmen books giving you a behind the scenes look at the upcoming movie.

We’re giving away both Watchmen: Portraits and Watchmen: The Film Companion and here are the winners!

Grand prize: A copy of Watchmen: Portraits and Watchmen: The Film Companion

• Debbie Hubbard – Spring Grove, PA

Runners-up: A copy of Watchmen: The Film Companion

• Kerry Williams – Medway, MA
• Eugene Kelly – Midgic, New Brunswick, Canada
• Marco Margaritoff – Bronx, NY

Thanks to everyone who entered – we have more great contests on the way including an upcoming Terminator Salvation giveaway!

Anyone who was even remotely interested in Watchmen has most likely already been to the theatre to see it (a lot were probably there for midnight screenings, even more have probably seen it more than once already). The critics in general have been pretty mixed on the film and movie fans have been a lot more positive towards it (although not everyone is praising it as much as the closest analogue The Dark Knight).

In this weeks Wrap Up:

Watchmen watches the top of the box office; Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan are A Couple of Dicks; we may not get Three Stories About Joan but we will get a lot of suing; Wahlberg takes Prisoners; Steve Carrell brings us the worlds first “Testosterone comedy” in Hi-T; Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck knows The 28th Amendment (and breaks my spell check).

[NOTE: This is not a review. If you're looking for a critical opinion on Watchmen, you can check out the excellent review by Screen Rant's own Vic Holtreman by going here.]

This week, many so-called critics around The Net have been lending their opinion on the subject of Watchmen, which officially opens in theaters today, amidst much hype and a bit of legal controversy. As each new critic has logged their opinion of the film, I’ve been watching those who’ve been watching Watchmen, and let’s just say I’ve come away with a few axes in need of some serious grinding.

Time to put the “rant” back into Screen Rant.

Short version: Watchmen is an ultra-violent, sexually explicit mystery film (with a few costumed heroes thrown in) that is visually stunning, but uneven.

Screen Rant reviews Watchmen

I’ve really been dreading writing this review because frankly, I’m still not sure how I feel about Zack Snyder’s big screen adaptation of the revered graphic novel (yes, I’m calling it a graphic novel), Watchmen.

There are some films that I really wish I could watch TWICE prior to writing a review: Big, highly-anticipated blockbusters tend to taint my initial viewing with expectations. Ideally there would be one viewing where I’d just let the film wash over me and then a second viewing where I could be more objective and analytical.

A scene that’s been ingratiated into pop culture is the Mac vs PC ads, which inspired the debate: Which is truly greater (obviously skewed towards Apple)?  We don’t really care about that particular debate, however it’s inspired something so much greater:

Wolverine vs. Rorschach (or Watchmen vs. X-Men Origins: Wolverine)

My buddy Mike from Eisentower30.com has put together an awesome mashup of every bit of Watchmen footage he could find. He took all the clips, US and international trailers and put them together in chronological order as they appear in the original graphic novel.

I had no idea there was this much footage out there – an entire 17 minutes worth!

To celebrate the Paramount Pictures UK release of Watchmen, London’s River Thames had a Watchmen spectacle that was bigger than life. Dr Manhattan, the blue skinned super-powered being rose above the Thames to a height of over 70 feet, towering over all those who attended the event.

This dramatic spectacle was created using the world’s biggest water screen projector.

[UPDATE: I've now seen the film and can confirm that this movie is absolutely NOT for kids.]

We’ve been talking (some would say ad nauseum) about the Watchmen movie which will be opening on March 6th for months now. I’ve had the sense that while the online community of folks who follow movie news sites is very much aware of this film, that that the average “man on the street” has never heard of it. That’s part of the reason we’ve been working to get the word out about it.

Every indication is that Watchmen is going to be probably one of the most amazing comic book-based movies ever to light up the big screen. Trailers, footage and reports on director Zack Snyder’s version of the Alan Moore story have been positive almost without exception.

There’s yet another a new Watchmen viral site that offers a bit of interactive fun to those willing to have their heads examined by good old Dr. Rorschach and his ink blot test.

The prize for taking this twisted exam?  Rorschach’s psychological survey of each of the individual Watchmen, expressed in the form of clips from the film, clips which feature just a tiny bit of never-before-seen footage.

The Watchmen panel was the highlight of my time at the San Francisco Wonder-Con. Probably because I have been anticipating this film since it was published as a graphic novel.  After hearing a mix of reviews about the film I was slightly apprehensive about attending the panel and seeing the first 20 minutes of the film. Especially because most reviews have said that those 20 minutes are incredible, and the rest of the film is sort of a let down.

We’re now in the final stretch of our long wait for the release of Watchmen on the big screen. To help quell your eagerness and anticipation, we have four brand new featurettes for your viewing pleasure.

The featurettes (or episodes of Watching the Watchmen) present interviews with the six actors who play the members of the Watchmen crime-fighting team – as well as Director Zack Snyder and Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons.

With DC Comics about to have another hit on their hands when Watchmen premieres in theaters on March 6th, a lot of movie blogs/news sites have been pondering where DC/Warner Bros. should go from here.

With all the hype surrounding Watchmen, and all the internet chatter about  DC Comics’ uncertain cinematic future, I found myself wondering: Why hasn’t DC had as much success at the box office as rival company Marvel?

In an attempt to answer that very question I came up with this comprehensive guide to how DC Comics SHOULD be making movies.