Watchmen TV Series in Development at HBO with Zack Snyder
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- October 5, 2015
- Danny F Santos
Anyone who enjoys graphic novels and comic books has a deep love for Alan Moore's Watchmen. The DC Comics series is a landmark achievement, and is considered by many to be the best comic book series of all time. I would personally give the best series of all time honor to The Sandman, but Watchmen comes in a very close second.
Hollywood had been trying to adapt the series for years before Zack Snyder made a very faithful adaptation for the big screen, which opened in March 2009. It was received with mixed reviews, with some fans thinking it was too slavish to the source material, while others thought it wasn’t slavish enough. In either case, the film tanked at the box office, and most people thought that was that. With the exception of different home video releases, mixing in different versions of the film.
However, Collider got the scoop that Snyder and HBO have had some discussion about bringing the Watchmen comic series to the premium television channel. Both Variety and Deadline have confirmed the report that “preliminary discussions regarding Watchmen have occurred,” but no deals are in place just yet.
I don’t know if there are any concrete ideas as to what this series will be, or what Zack Snyder’s involvement will ultimately entail. If the series goes through, he’ll definitely be on board as an executive producer, but outside of that, there’s no real indication how much input he’ll have in the series.
There’s also the big question of what the series would be about, would it be a complete adaptation or a sequel? An intriguing possibility is that DC published a series of eight prequels that are collectively known as Before Watchmen, so it could be a prequel series that leads into the film.
HBO doesn’t have the best track record for launching a new series so there’s a good chance this series will never see the light of day. I enjoyed how close Snyder stayed to the source material for the film, but should the premium channel actually produce the series, I would like it to deviate completely from the film and comic book series so it can tell an original story with the characters.
Start the series with the Minutemen and have the cast eventually evolve into what we ended up with in Watchmen would be a fascinating series arc. That would give the creators more freedom early on to create original stories and characters which could organically radically alter the end of the series in surprising ways.
Stay tuned for more Watchmen TV news.
