Monday Morning Quarterback Part III
By BOP Staff
March 11, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Without answering anything spoiler-ish, what did those of you who watched Watchmen think of it?
Max Braden: Two and three quarters hours is just too long, and it still felt like material was left out, so I feel let down that the filmmakers boxed themselves in with just one movie. The Comedian's moral character was key to the theme of the movie but it caught me off guard and pulled me out of the viewing experience. Still, Rorschach completely made up for any complaints. Jackie Earle Haley's performance was excellent.
Josh Spiegel: As someone who never read the graphic novel, I can say that I wasn't too overwhelmed with the plot or confused. However, I didn't much enjoy myself either. Jackie Earle Haley was fantastic throughout, and the special effects were very impressive, but I feel like Zack Snyder was either wallowing in the violence of the film or hammering points into my head with the help of awful musical cues. Also, I'm with Max: way too long.
Pete Kilmer: It was about ten minutes too long, and could have done without everything after Antartica. Otherwise I was pretty pleased with it and Jackie Earl Haley and Jeffery Dean Morgan....wow, they were just terrific.
Craig Hemenway: The best performance in the movie was Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, followed closely by Jackie Earle Haley as Rorshach. I suspect Haley benefits more from the film's success - and it was a success for opening - than Crudup does simply because he is a lesser name at this point. Haley may be a Bad News Bear but he's no golden god.
My single biggest question on walking out of a Friday morning showing was whether or not viewers unfamiliar with the comic series would be able to follow the plot. In other words, was this an "X-Men" or the modern equivalent of 1986's "Dune?" In the end, I think it falls closer to the latter than the former. A gorgeous film that is made for fans, I expect the multiplier on this to be very shallow. I would bet that the film takes under $150 million in its first six weeks of release. For those of you who have been following the site since the HSX days, you know that's a mighty rough multiplier given a $55.7 million opening weekend.
There's always a discussion over whether or not the length of a movie hurts opening weekend. Yes, 2 hours and 43 minutes is a damn long film. But when opening across over 3,000 venues, it's tough to believe the run time hurt the film's take. That's a lot of venues to sell out before movie length factors in.
In short, this was a film for the comic fans. Even then, it only pleases the non-fanatics who accept that the movie adaptation necessarily sacrifices both subtext and portions of the series itself. As one of those people, I think we got a movie much better than we had any right to expect and that would be a landmark film if not for the last two Batman movies.
Reagen Sulewski: I felt that Zack Snyder knew the words but not the music. He gave us a faithful adaptation of what was on the page, but didn't go deeper than that to really give us the world of Watchmen. The alt-ness of the Watchmen's world of 1985 didn't come through on the screen for me, and many of the jumps in the structure of the film just made it a disjointed experience. I'd say that Alan Moore was proven right about what comics can do that films can't.
Really, Snyder was in a no-win scenario: he needed to divest himself from a strict textualist adaptation, but he'd have been crucified for it.
David Mumpower: I'm not dazzled by the comic book medium per se. I find it limited in some ways and undone in others by its lack of female voices. Wanted perfectly represents the voice of the genre for me, which is a pretty strong indictment. What always struck me as impressive about Watchmen the graphic novel is that Moore seemed to feel the same outrage. He went out of his way to attack all of the limitations of the genre, thereby creating a brilliant, seminal piece of archetype assassination fiction.
Zack Snyder is respectful of all the themes of the novel, with many critics asserting this was his principal fault as a director. I didn't see it that way, feeling that this was about a best case scenario result for a movie adaptation. I've always said this should have been a limited run series instead and, let's be honest, we would have gotten exactly the same cast in that scenario since none of them except maybe Crudup is too big for television. What Snyder managed to do was be true to the source material, find a better ending than the silly psychic squid thing Moore chose, and offer a relatively kick-ass comic book movie. It's a solid A for me.
Kevin Chen: Your mistake here is conflating the comic book medium with the superhero genre. Wanted is as representative of comic books as Disney is representative of animation. Stating that comic books are hampered by a lack of female voices is lack of exposure to material, not a state of the (apologies in advance) art.
David Mumpower: Fair enough. I'll restate my terms that mainstream comic books from the two industry giants, Marvel and DC, have almost no female voices. There is Gail Simone, the best writer in her craft, and then it's hard to name a second one. I think the woman from Occasional Superheroine is getting to write something at some point, but it speaks volumes that this is the closest I can come to naming a second one off my head.
Kevin Chen: I'm not really current with the state of the industry, but there were a number of female editors in both of the big houses since I started collecting, including Jeanette Kahn, Alisa Kwitney, the late Kim Yale, and Karen Berger (who presided over the Vertigo imprint and saw its success explode with Gaiman's Sandman).
Artists/inkers probably outweigh writers, but you're still looking at some prolific creators like Louise Simonson, Barbara Kesel, Devin Grayson, and Ann Nocenti. If you stop talking about Marvel and DC then you find an even wider range of creators, including Wendy Pini, Donna Barr, Lea Hernandez, Amanda Conner, Colleen Doran, Jill Thompson, and, you know, Kaja Foglio.
Rats. Somebody already made the Golden God joke.
Kim Hollis: Which cast member do you believe is most likely to see a career boost as a result of their appearance/performance in Watchmen?
Brandon Scott: Malin Akerman seems to be getting the most hype, but I think Patrick Wilson stands a good chance of finally getting more films from this (granted, I haven't seen the film yet). Wilson deserves more known roles regardless as he is a good and capable actor. I don't know that I can say the same about Akerman yet.
Max Braden: Without a doubt I think Jackie Earle Haley benefits the most, because he was prominently featured and really added a lot to the role. People who haven't seen the movie may not get that impression from the trailer, but what counts for future roles is the response of producers who have seen the movie. I think Billy Crudup also gets a significant boost mostly because he's flown pretty far under the radar of most audiences. I hope I'm forgiven for this, but during the movie I kept thinking that Akerman was actually Lucy Lawless.
Daron Aldridge: My inclination is to go with Malin Akerman simply because she seems to be the one that the studio via its marketing has given the most exposure to. USA Network's regular ads and promos for Watchmen centered and prominently featured her. It's a far cry from 2007's The Brothers Solomon.
Josh Spiegel: I agree with Max; at the least, I hope he's right about Jackie Earle Haley. After 2006's "Little Children," it's nice to see him get such a prominent role. Haley's the best thing about Watchmen and deserves the attention, as would Patrick Wilson. Aside from looking pretty, I found Akerman's performance to be quite bad, actually; I also sat through her performance in The Heartbreak Kid, which was pretty bad all around, so I'm not sure if she deserves the attention.
Pete Kilmer: Everyone in the cast minus Malin Ackerman was just terrific. Haley, Morgan, Crudup and Cugino and Patrick Wilson really just nailed the parts. Ackerman was fine but just outplayed by everyone else. If I'm a producer I'm looking at Haley and Morgan really hard for some serious roles.
David Mumpower: I thought that Carla Gugino was by far the weak link. Her stuff must show up in the extended DVD version of the movie, but I can see why it got whittled down so much. She was just too shrill, which is surprising for such a great actress. Matthew Goode, whom I usually like, wasn't much better. Everyone else was brilliant. I think Malin Akerman is going to get a lot of work from this for her body more than her body of work and I think Jackie Earl Haley has re-established himself as a fine character actor. The person I think that could leverage this into breakout success, however, is Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Women already loved him and now men do as well. He's about to be 43 and is poised to be the proverbial overnight success if his next few projects take off.
Kim Hollis: Honestly, I think Patrick Wilson stands to gain a lot from this. The honest evaluation on Haley is that he's going to be pigeonholed into character roles, just because of his appearance. His best-case scenario would be a Paul Giamatti-like career trajectory, which isn't a bad thing at all. Wilson, on the other hand, is good looking and has shown that he's not one-note at all. He could be placed at the center of a tentpole and probably do quite well, or he could do some more awards bait-type films. I do think it's interesting that the two people I discuss here were both key players in the tiny tiny film Little Children, which I didn't even like that much (though it wasn't particularly because of them). It's fascinating that they both moved on to a blockbuster-type project so quickly.
And I'll whisper, "No."
Kim Hollis: What are your final thoughts on the Watchmen experiment?
Brandon Scott: As a non-fan of the title coming in, and due to the fact that I have yet to see it, I can't entirely answer this. I will say that the box office numbers are lower than I anticipated, and the reviews are slightly better than I anticipated. Apparently Snyder stayed very faithful to the graphic novel (almost every review I have read has stated that with clarity), and this may have hurt how it plays on screen. It's the whole "filming of the unfilmable" sort of ideology. I respect Snyder for taking the risk but I have to think Warner's expected more of this title. Throw in the word that they plan on putting out an extended cut of the film in theaters in June, you almost wonder if that will happen with this box office result now. Then again, there may be an ever so slight box office hit to those in the know, with some waiting to see it in it's desired entirety down the road. But again, only a "pequeno" hit to the total if anything at all.
Max Braden: I was initially baffled that it took this long for the project to get off the ground. I'm all for artistic integrity but it annoys me that Watchmen had to clear so many legal hurdles to come to the screen. On the other hand, had it been greenlighted earlier, we may have instead been given a campy puff piece directed by Joel Schumacher. I think the tone of the X-Men, Spider-man, and Batman series in the last decade helped shape and support the more series themes in Watchmen. As far as box office goes I think they have to be pleased at this result for a project like this in March.
Pete Kilmer: While I will always wonder what a Terry Gilliam directed Watchmen with Jude Law as Ozymandis would have been like, I can't really complain with Zack Snyder's effort. With this film, for the important people who pay attention, he's just made his bones for "serious" movie project considerations. He's leaped beyond McG and Brett Ratner as a filmmaker and is really elbowing his way up into Big Name Director level. He's not there yet, but if he continues the way he has with Dawn of the Dead, 300 and now Watchmen, well, look out. He knows the material he works from. He knows the audience who he is aiming for and most important he knows how to make a film that works.
As for looking at the Watchmen property itself and thinking about other classic graphic novels to be made into movies? Well, the only other two that were on this level are Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: The Killing Joke. And I don't see those two getting made anytime in the next ten years since we had The Dark Knight. Sure, Sam Mendes is looking at doing an adaption of Preacher, and Shia LaBeouf may or may not star in Y The Last Man, but none of those have the impact that Watchmen had once it became a trade paperback.
Craig Hemenway: Experiment? One way or another, this was guaranteed studio money once the proper director was found and a script hewing to the source was produced. DVD sales on this will put it far over the top if nothing else. For an "unfilmable" project, Snyder did fairly well. We can argue whether the final product was too slavish or not - fine. But it was better than I had any right to expect.
It was, however, about three years too late. The impact of Watchmen was diluted by the two Nolan-directed Batman films, much as Dark Knight Returns anticipated the comic run of Watchmen by about six months. (Note to Alan Moore: Please don't issue a death threat against me. I know these are two different properties, but both had a similar influence on the terrifyingly bad 1990s comic scene. I'm sorry you came second.)
In sum, Watchmen doesn't help good comic movies get made or change the film landscape given what's come before. That doesn't change how I feel about the film; it's simply nowhere near as revolutionary as the bsae comic due to changing tastes and the intervening sensibility of movies.
Sean Collier: This is the way the Watchmen ends, not with a bang but a whimper. For a film with 20 years of hype, ten years of legal wrangling, one year of non-stop advertising, and three hours of runtime...it did okay. It was okay. No one was particularly disappointed, and it'll make a little money in the end. An acceptable result, but not one befitting the novel. But, my answers have devolved into disappointed fanboy love here, so let's call it a day.
David Mumpower: The answers come down to art and commerce. From an artistic perspective, it's a good enough film to satisfy the die-hard fans who had expected to have their hearts broken by it. Watchmen also would have won the commerce war if not for losing the Fox lawsuit. Since it did, that aspect becomes a draw. It will eventually make money, but that day has been put on hold for at least six months. In evaluating the project, the hardest solution to find is a place Warner Bros. went wrong and could have done better. Other than in the securing of the rights, there really isn't one. So, this is about as well as could be done, but it's still not a huge success.