Watchmen on Blu-Ray
POSTED BY: OPPYH
UPDATED: Monday, August 3, 2009 13:11
VIEWED: 6048
PAGE 2 of 7
Yep, it is a great movie though not for mainstream audiences, which, I would say, Hollywood was hoping to tap into.
It cost $130M to make and it made $182.7M, which, by Hollywood standards, is considered a failure (according to Box Office Mojo).
I think it will make lots more in DVD release.
I'll be getting my Blu-ray Director's Cut this coming week (probably Tues).
Hey Chris, you said Blue wee-wee (chortle-snort)
you slay me, LOL.
SGG
Tawabawho?
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Quote:
I think it will make lots more in DVD release.
Definitely. My take on it is that it's destined to be a bit of a "cult-classic", in that it will live on far longer via DVD than its performance at the box office would have indicated, much like "V for Vendetta".
And I'll definitely be one of the ones helping it reach that point, since I anticipate buying at least one copy of Watchmen. It was intriguing enough that I'm considering picking up the graphic novel as well, even though I'm *not* a "comic-book guy" by any stretch of the imagination.
Thinking that Watchmen was going to be a big smash hit at the box office, with mainstream moviegoers and "normal" people was pretty much a risky proposition from the outset. The story just isn't comfortable for the average superhero-movie fan. The good guys aren't that good - downright evil, at times - and the bad guys aren't all that bad. It's a murky moral morass, and that's not fertile ground for making big box-office bucks. (Wow, what a bunch of alliteration THAT was!)
Mike
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
If it wasn't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college...
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Quote:
Originally posted by chrisisall:
It was violent in the excess- the fingers-thing was icky, but otherwise I didn't see anything so shocking. A little disturbing, maybe.
3 hours never went by so fast.
When I first heard it was being made into a film, I was thinking no way in hell. It will probably be PG-13 travesty. When I realized it was getting an "R" rating, I felt better. And a hard "R" rating at that. I'm not saying that I like it better than the graphic novel, but it captures the feel of it perfectly.
And while I'm talking graphic novel, what is the deal with the writer Alan Moore?
Here's an article about Alan Moore dissing the movie:
When asked in an interview with ReelzChannel.com about original Watchmen writer Alan Moore's dismissal of his movie, [director Zack] Snyder was quoted as saying "Worst case scenario - Alan puts the movie on his DVD player on a cold Sunday in London and watches and says, 'Yeah, that doesn't suck too bad.'" When this was brought up with Moore himself in a later interview in the British Tripwire comics fanzine, the writer commented "That's the worst case scenario? I think he's underestimated what the worst case scenario would be... that's never going to happen in my DVD player in 'London' [Moore very famously lives in Northampton]. I'm never going to watch this fucking thing."
"I'm not locked in here with you....You're locked in here with me"Rorshack.
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Moore is cranky, yeah. But after League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I can't really blame him.
I bet he watches it anyway, secretly.
"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him."
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Moore seems to diss every attempt to "mass-market" his work, it seems. He seems to have taken the tack that it's okay with him if Hollywood wants to make movies of his stuff, as long as they don't try to associate it with his work, since he feels comics (or graphic novels) are a completely different world and experience than movies.
And I kind of get that. And if he WERE to get involved with a movie of one of his projects (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Killing Joke, etc.), how much input would the studio let him have? How much control? It sounds like he'd want COMPLETE creative control, and I just don't see that happening, ever.
So he says to keep them separate. And I'm okay with that. I gather the movie tries to touch on all the basic aspects of the story, but I also understand that there's stuff that's going to get left out. That's what makes me want to check out the graphic stuff. Same with V for Vendetta.
Also, it should be noted that the ONE movie Ken Kesey refused to ever see was the adaptation of his "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". Could be that great artists just can't bear to look at others' interpretations of their work.
Mike
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
If it wasn't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college...
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He used to be more accomodationg, and din't always have his name removed from the project. But he was apparently very pissed when they made big changes to From Hell, and then with LXG, besides massive changes to the story, and a rather shit movie overall, another writer sued the studio and Moore, as the movie actually ended up closer to a script written years ago, than it was to Moore's comic. Moore was NOT happy being drug into that.
As for the movie, I really like it, though I think they were maybe a bit too slavishly faithfull to the source material, when a little more adaptaion might have been in order.
And it's going to have to sell a shitload of DVDs to make a profit, unfortunetly. The numbers above don't even represent the massive ammount of cash that went into marketing, not the multi-million pay-out WB had to make to FOX for not having sufficiently cleared the rights before starting production.
"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him."
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Quote:
Originally posted by Kwicko:
That's what makes me want to check out the graphic stuff. Same with V for Vendetta.
The Watchmen graphic novel varies somewhat from the movie, mostly in stuff left out and in one major story point. V for Vendetta varies greatly from one medium to another. In every conversation I've had about it, the people who had read the graphic novel hated the movie, and the people who hadn't read it thought the movie was great. And, as far as I've heard, Alan Moore loathed the adaptation of V for Vendetta, and has been pissed off at Hollywood ever since. He was absolutely convinced they would ruin Watchmen, which could well be his greatest accomplishment; how many other graphic novels are ranked as one of the hundred greatest novels of all time? I absolutely don't begrudge him for being an angry artist. I do hope that one day he gives the movie a chance, since most fans of his original work seem to love it, unlike V, but I can hardly blame him if he doesn't want to risk it.
Quote:
Originally posted by Storymark:
I think they were maybe a bit too slavishly faithfull to the source material
To me, that's a big selling point. When I love a book, I want to see a film adaptation bring it to life, not take it off on some random tangent. When said book actually includes graphical representations of scenes, I like seeing that follow through as well. Aside from a couple of the costumes, I think they did that beautifully. They also followed the story beautifully, and where they had to cut things down, some really brilliant bits were written to make it work. I think the people writing and making this movie all loved the original story, and I think that's how film adaptations should be made.
That's the problem with Harry Potter. They started making movies before the series was even complete, and most people working on the films hadn't even read the story, let alone care about it. I guess the goal was to cash in, and that they've done quite well, but they didn't get much of that cash from me...
[/sig]
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Quote:They DID adapt it a little- they left out the pirate story that sort of framed the big picture, and I think that might have been a wise choice, cinematically, although it works SO WELL in the the graphic novel...
Originally posted by Storymark:
As for the movie, I really like it, though I think they were maybe a bit too slavishly faithfull to the source material, when a little more adaptaion might have been in order.
The laughing Chrisisall
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Quote:Colour me one who didn't read the novel (picked it up at a comic store, wasn't enthralled & put it back down, but LOVED the movie! More than the movie this thread is about, in point of fact. Well, a little more.
Originally posted by PhoenixRose:
In every conversation I've had about it, the people who had read the graphic novel hated the movie [V For Vendetta], and the people who hadn't read it thought the movie was great.
The laughing Chrisisall
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