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?”
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DEFINING THE ‘COMIC BOOK MOVIE’
There have always been two distinct approaches to comic book films. There are films like Watchmen, The Spirit, 300 and Sin City – films which adhere too closely to their comic book sources, trying to recreate those comics (sometimes panel for panel) in cinematic form. For films like Sin City and 300, this imitative style proved $uccessful; for The Spirit, not so successful. In the case of Watchmen, the verdict is still being debated, and will likely continue to be debated for years to come.
Opposite these “comic book movies” are films like The Dark Knight, Iron Man or Spider-Man, which are inspired by comic books but don’t try to BE comic books, instead opting to present the often-fantastic world of comic book superheroes in a more “realistic” cinematic fashion.
Having defined both approaches to comic book films, I ask again: has Watchmen killed the “comic book movie?” i.e., those films which try to be “living comic books,” championing style over substance; slavish fidelity to the source material over the hope of mass appeal?
STUDIO BACKLASH
Zack Snyder has said in many interviews that getting Warner Bros. to make a Watchmen film that closely adhered to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original text (the alternate 1985 universe, the adult nature of the story, a certain climax involving a giant squid) was an uphill battle. The studio (like so many other studios that had previously passed on Watchmen) wisely felt that the denseness and oddity of the comic would limit the mass appeal of the film, which, even in the pre-production stages, was already being tagged with a huge budget.
Snyder argued that to do Watchmen “right,” the source material needed to be slavishly followed–that there was no better way to tell the story other than how Moore and Gibbons had already told it. The result is a Watchmen movie which is both liberated and limited: Liberated in the sense of what big-budget films are allowed to be (wonderfully stylized, full of psychopath heroes and dangling blue junk); Limited in the sense that Snyder’s take on Watchmen never succeeds in breaking free of its comic book boundaries, in order to live and breathe as its own unique piece of art. (BTW, that’s not an opinion: that’s the split down the middle you’ve been seeing amongst critics and audiences. Those who dig the comic book for all its dense, heady weirdness tend to love the film; those that don’t, don’t. And that divided opinion is surely taking its toll at the box office.)
So the question is: Going forward, how many box office millions are studios going to be willing to risk, just to pay homage to the fanboy nation? Watchmen screenwriter David Hayter recently asked moviegoers to see the film a second time, in order to send the message to Hollywood that there is a market for “complex” comic book films. By now, however, he may be preaching to an empty choir.
DO FANBOYS RUN THE SHOW?
One thing that was very unique about the whole Watchmen experience was the level of consideration the filmmakers gave to the fanboy nation. In every interview or panel he was on, Zack Snyder went to great lengths to stress that he too was a Watchmen fanboy, and that he would not let the fanboy nation down by mucking with source material.
Now Snyder could’ve been totally B.S.’ing us all, but I don’t believe that. I believe that as far as filmmakers go, Zack Snyder really is a fanboy who was genuinely making this film for fanboys first, mass audiences second. Time will ultimately reveal the wisdom (or lack thereof) of that approach, but as of right now, it’s surely questionable.
Screen Rant’s own Rob Keyes recently wrote an article on the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie, where he posed the question of just how much (or not) the filmmakers behind Wolverine are listening to fanboy opinions about how characters like Deadpool or Gambit get translated to the big screen. In that same vein, I find myself wondering: when it comes to comic book films, who really runs the show? Did fanboys really have that much influence before Watchmen? And now that Watchmen is coming up short, how much influence will fanboys not have going forward? Is a core fan base of comic book geeks really worth catering a big-budget film to? Or is mass appeal the bottom line every comic book filmmaker should be going for?
THE RISK OF MAKING A ‘COMIC BOOK MOVIE’
The simple truth is, some people are really into comic books while others can’t stand them. And we all know the reasons why the haters hate: The characters are too fantastic, the stories are too outlandish, the dialogue is too cheesy, etc., etc.
In order to make comic book films appeal to an audience beyond the comic store, filmmakers have to separate their adaptations from the “trappings” of their comic book sources, mining the raw essence of what made a superhero interesting or appealing in the first place, and then build a film on that foundation. People need never to have read a Batman comic to be intrigued by Bruce Wayne’s dark societal view, or a single issue of Spider-Man to relate to Peter Parker’s teenage angst. Of course, some would say that character recognition has everything to do with a comic book film’s chances at mass appeal (wide character recognition = wide film appeal). I would remind those people of the cases of Batman & Robin and V For Vendetta. Sometimes widely known doesn’t mean mass appeal, and vice versa.
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118 Comments
@ LordThanos X
Where on earth in my post did I state that Watchmen was SUCKED because it was not Spider Man or Batman?
@ prototype
Did you post saying anything about liking it. and I don’t think the marketing was the issue
Then we agree to disagree.
ok
I disagree with the premise that fanboys of the book tend to love the movie. As such a fanboy, knowing what could have been just made me more disgusted with the stiff acting, the poor pacing, and the lousy billboard dialogue of this expensive, glowing blue lump. Regardless of the R-rating, the familiarity or unfamiliarity with the graphic novel, or for chrissakes the blue willy (really?), the box office dived because Watchmen is a bad movie.
You obviously have never read The Spirit if you think that film followed the source material closely or faithfully.
Watchmen was the unfilmable graphic novel and this was proven in the awful photocopy job they attempted in the film.
Honestly, Hollywood can stay out of the comic book film business forever. The saying is always, “the book is always better”. It is true of novels and short stories and it is true with the comics.
I can’t speak for sin city, but to me the difference between 300 and watchmen is obvious. Watchmen is nearly 400 pages long, while 300 is less than 100.
That means when adapting 300, there was room to include everything from the comic plus padding to make it work better as a movie.
A true watchmen ‘comic book film’ would be like 8 hours long. The version we were given was almost 3 hours long and still left out half the source material. So ironically, by trying to be so faithful he has stripped the comic down to a hollow shell of what it was. It looked like watchmen, but it didn’t feel like watchmen. It was missing the spirit of the comic, because we didn’t have enough information and time to absorb all the characters and events that shaped the watchmen world. Most importantly, we didn’t get to absorb the politically charged climate. It didn’t have that sense of impending doom that was so important to the source. Basically what I’m saying is, watchmen can’t me made into a shot for shot adaptation because it’s way too long. Snyder tried anyway, and what we got was half a film.
To adapt watchmen successfully, it would have to be rewritten, ala V for Vendetta. That movie worked because it took the basic plot, characters, and ideas of the comic and wrote a movie around them. So as different as the film was, it still had the spirit of the comic. I had all the same reactions and emotions while watching as I did while reading. And the ending was just as satisfying, if not more.
Also it should be noted that neither watchmen nor v for vendetta had narration like 300, which greatly eases the transfer from novel to film. Another thing to consider is pacing. Scenes that play perfectly in panels can often seem long and drawn out on film. That’s why its so important to rewrite an adaptation like watchmen. You have to play to the strengths of your medium, so when that medium changes, so must the story.
For what its worth, I think watchmen would have worked great as a 12 part HBO miniseries, provided it had the budget. Then they could make a true shot for shot adaptation with no changes or omissions, and retain the feel of a serial stroy.
Watchmen has moments of brilliance, but succumbs to mediocrity too often and this becomes frustrating for the audience. It entangles the viewers with strong characters but fails to deliver a strong conclusion. The movie is nearly 3 hours long but it did not have 3 hours worth of material. It could have, but Snyder decided it was more important to spend nearly a minute zooming out from a tombstone. In the end, I think Alan Moore was right. A graphic novel by its very nature is able to do things which can not be translated onto the big screen, or they can if you want unintended comedic or implausible moments. On paper, Watchmen is brilliant, on film, it’s just another comic book movie.
Firstly I don’t think Watchmen has killed the Comic Book Movie wave or even the R-Rated comic book movie for that matter. I can honestly say that if they make Terminator Salvation PG-13 it will be a let down on some level. I’ve never read the graphic novel of Watchmen so I went as a “newbie” if you will when I watched it, but I did read a quick overview on Wikipedia (yes I know this is not the same as reading the whole graphic novel), so I wasn’t completely blind by events of the film, but I must admit when I first saw the trailer I was interested because it appeared to be an R-rated super hero movie, and because it looked cool. I thought the plot was good, and direction, but it was still lacking. I don’t really agree that films should be made specifically for fanboys that are going to be released to the general public, and Im glad for the most part they are not, because lets face it most of the revenue is coming from the the general movie watcher public as far as films are concerned.
i actually thought watchmen was a good movie. i dont know what people are on about saying that its a crap movie.
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