Liam Burke contrasts its marketing with that of 20th Century Fox’s adaptation of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Stephen Norrington, 2003): “Unlike The League, fidelity was fetishized at each turn in the production and promotion of Watchmen.” Bob Rehak argues that the movie “embodied the many paradoxes of contemporary blockbuster film production, so capable of outré visualization yet so constrained in its operations.” Rehak also calls the film “fanservice with a $120 million budget.” Anime fans use the term fanservice to refer to media creators’ gratuitous attempts to please their imagined core audience, especially at the expense of momentum or plausibility I would therefore disagree with Rehak’s characterization, in that I read the Watchmen not as an attempt to serve fans of the book but to serve an intellectual property holder by expanding the audience for that property. Scholars have tended to discuss the film in terms of its adaptation of the book. And that’s exactly what’s wrong with it.” Many called Snyder’s fidelity “slavish.” The reviews confirm George Bluestone’s 1957 observation: “Whenever a film becomes a financial or even a critical success, the question of ‘faithfulness’ is given hardly any thought.” The marketing had worked too hard to court perceived fans of the comic. Lois Lane weeps over Superman’s corpse beside Wonder Woman in Time Warner’s superhero pietà at the end of Batman v Superman (Warner Brothers, 2016).ĭespite the film’s many revisions of its source, reviewers hurled back the marketing’s rhetoric: “ Watchmen’s biggest problem, ironically, is that it’s too faithful.” The movie “takes loyalty to new limits. Photo by the author.īatman lowers Superman, killed in action, from this Golgotha, complete with a utility-pole cross, in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Warner Brothers, 2016). The back cover of After Watchmen…What’s Next? converts the after-midnight hands of the doomsday clock into a check mark, inviting potential readers to check off other comics from DC. The self-contained text of Watchmen, the cover suggests, need not end. The cover of the free advertising booklet After Watchmen…What’s Next? presents the book’s doomsday clock motif showing a time after nuclear midnight. Jenette Kahn, president of DC comics from 1981 to 2002, “The Phenomenon: The Comic that Changed Comics” (Warner Home Video, 2009). It was all of our job to try to create the analogous movie-going experience.” From “The Phenomenon: The Comic that Changed Comics” (Warner Home Video, 2009). Producer Lloyd Levin says, “ Watchmen, the graphic novel, is always going to be there.
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