Aronofsky to Direct Watchmen

[Inbetweener]

On another thread yesterday some of us were talking about "Requiem for a Dream". It got me wondering why we haven't seen Darren Aronofsky do anything in a while...particularly where his style should mesh well with Comic movies. Anway, I did a little research and found that he has been connected to a project on the Watchmen. Anyone else hear this? Sorry if it's old news but it's such great news I had to pass it on. The Watchmen was friggin awesome.

[rouge2]

Watchmen has been passed around a lot. Until it's been cast and in pre-production, I wouldn't get your hopes up. Terry Gilliam was in the director's seat for years on the project and it never flew. In the same vein Aronofsky and Frank Miller were going to do Batman:Year One (!) together but were rejected in favour of Batman Begins (!?!?!) .

Also, I'm pretty sure I'd rather this movie not get made now. After Hollywood royally messed up the last two Alan Moore properties the had (From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), I have little faith they'd even understand a fraction of Watchmen's complexity.

[DaLuvster89]

I kinda feel the same way as rouge2 - I don't want the Watchmen story to be butchered. I don't want it to be sub-par. I don't want to finish watching it and go, "Eh." It's gotta be perfect, and I don't know if that's possible. It would be cool if the movie can be made, but how much of the story will be cut out? How much of the dialogue destroyed?

I'm tenative. But I guess it goes with the territory when discussing one of the greatest comic book stories ever written...

[Inbetweener]

I couldn't agree more...all though I'm confident that Aronofsky couldn't screw it up...too bad anyway. He'd have to falter pretty bad from what I've seen of him.

The Watchmen is such an important story...a standout in one of the most innovative and productive times in comic history. It must be handled impeccably.

[NorrinRadd]

How could you screw up Watchmen? Make it EVEN MORE boring than it already is? If a director could do that they'd be called Stanley Kubrick.

[kon-el]

I think that the only way that a Watchmen story could be done is if it was a 12 show miniseries on HBO or something like that, I would not ever want to see it "butchered" to a 90 minute movie.

[tchipley]

Put it on the Sci-Fi Channel. Break it up into 12 two hour parts.

[hail_eris]

I could see it as a two-and-a-half hour movie. Really, it's not that complex a story (we're not talking about Lynch's adaptation of "Dune" here) - it's essentially a murder mystery, with a wacky socio-political twist at the end. All the EC comic throwback references would most likely be scuttled, but I don't think it would be too great a loss. I think Aranofksy's "Pi" can easily stand alongside Watchmen in terms of depth of story. And before he tackled "Requiem for a Dream" Hubert Selby's works were regarded as mostly unfilmable - Aranofsky obviously changed that opinion. I think that, in spite of the recent success of comic movies, the greatest obstacle to this production will be finding financing in post-9/11 Hollywood. Some of those plot elements hit a little too close to home...

[AZS]

You can't make Watchmen for the simple catch 22 of it now.

The book came out in the heart of the cold war, and has those themes running through it pretty heavy. The big ending was a play on that.
But in the current climate, its pretty much been shown that instigating a major terrorist attack against NYC won't bring the world together, quite the contrary.

So you can't make the movie as the story is laid out in the book.

And you sure as hell can't change the story, or a million and one fanboys will get up in arms.

So the catch 22 is that the movie really can't be made today.