HBO is adding superheroes to its roster of bratty dragons and robot cowboys: the latest adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal comic Watchmen has officially received a series order! And…it’s premiering next year? And the cast is enormous?
Click through for all the details we’ve got so far!
According to EW, the show will hit the network some time in 2019, along with Game of Thrones‘ final season and the long-awaited return of True Detective. There still aren’t many details on the show, which will be headed up by Damon Lindelof, but we do know that they’re keeping the basic premise of a society that treats once-legal superheroes as outlaws. HBO has also announced a giant cast, including Regina King, Jeremy Irons, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Adelaide Clemens, Andrew Howard, Tom Mison, Frances Fisher, Jacob Ming-Trent, Sara Vickers, Dylan Schombing, Lily Rose Smith and Adelynn Spoon…. but they haven’t specified who is playing whom?
Since your guess are as good as ours, we invite you to suggest them in the comments! What do you think? Will anyone watch Watchmen? Will Alan Moore be disgruntled?
Interested enough to check it out. And of course, Alan Moore perpetually disgruntled. (I’m assuming your question was rhetorical.)
I’m still puzzled how a writer who was going to use Charlton characters, then was forced to use derivatives of same characters, wants to treat the Watchmen as somehow sacrosanct, as if they can’t be touched by any other creator. Then that same writer ends up doing Supreme which was a ripoff in itself. SMH, as the kids say.
@1: When you put it like that, I wonder if his [Moore’s] logic isn’t essentially ‘It’s only a bad thing when I’m not the one doing it.’
@1 I find that Alan Moore is a highly talented writer, with interesting ideas, who thinks he is a SUPREME writer with the very BEST ideas, and then when other talented people (NOT League, though…that was a hack job to aggrandize Connery) have other related interesting ideas and then have the temerity to change anything at all (like, for example, Americans who are not nihilists making a movie a thinly veiled allegory about Republicans flirting with fascism in the 2000’s and not making that movie a thinly veiled allegory of Thatcherism in the 1980s and dumping the rather idiotic, IMO, fascination with anarchy) having a snit fit.
He himself has admitted that he doesn’t like sharing, so any adaptations already a problem, and his gargantuan (not entirely deserved) ego supplies the rest of the problem.
@2 Nah, it’s bad when he does it too. Watchmen is an overrated, offensive (as in, unintentionally so) snooze fest imo. None of my comic reading, or comic creating, friends like it. I’ve tried other Moore works and it’s much the same. I’ll be skipping this one, HBO.
“Will Alan Moore be disgruntled?”
I’m not entirely certain that Moore has ever been gruntled.
@@.-@. Puck: I’d agree with the overrated assessment in the sense that many comic readers of its era treated it as holy text. It’s still very good and an interesting deconstruction of superheroic characters. But worshipping it? Just no.
Not all of Moore’s output is throwaway, either. I still remember his Swamp Thing run. Even Promethea was worthwhile, until he did the mystical kabbalah arc.
I even tried reading his massive novel Jerusalem, which probably has good bits in it, but gave up early on. When the very first few pages feature overly detailed descriptions like the exact patterns on a lil girl’s hair clip… Holy shit! I decided the book would drive me insane. That kinda over-writing works better as instructions to a detail oriented artist, like Dave Gibbons, than as printed text in the actual story.
So while I agree with Moore on some things (yeah, League was laughable trash), his stance on adaptations and continuations (in a serial medium, for crissakes!) became very tiresome.
@@.-@. Puck: Count me among the “It’s overrated” crowd. And even more than that, I place quite a lot of blame for the XTREME!-ization of the industry in the 90’s – and its subsequent collapse – on Watchmen (and Dark Knight Returns).
@7. Daniel: some of the blame, yes, but quite a bit of it belongs to a certain set of artists that left Marvel, especially the one who couldn’t draw feet, or good anatomy in general, and actually named his studio Extreme!
Damon LIndelof gives me pause. He was responsible for some of the worst excesses of Lost. His track record with sci-fi films is pretty bad (Into Darkness is the best he has ever done and even that is highly controversial).
Don Johnson is playing the Comedian or I’ll eat my hat. Or Rorschach’s hat.