10 Classic Movies The Directors Won't Stop Changing

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen is a dense, complex story. This meant that Zack Snyder had to shed a lot of the texture of the book to even get it down to a manageable film length.

Even at the earliest stages of production, Snyder had to discard plans to include the pirate-themed story-within-the-story Tales From The Black Freighter, filmed in the stylised 300 aesthetic, because it would have added another $20 million to an already over-inflated budget. Black Freighter was instead released as a half-hour animated feature on DVD, voiced by Gerard Butler.

The theatrical version of Watchmen ran to well over two hours and yet seemed to skip over a lot of material in condensing it down to that length.

In the summer of 2009, Warner Bros. released a Watchmen Director's Cut on home media, to which Snyder added another 24 minutes to flesh out the story and characters. Whole story threads like the bond between the first Nite Owl and his successor, leading to the former's death, were restored, leading to a richer experience.

Not content with that, however, November 2009 also saw the release of The Ultimate Cut. Standing at over three and a half hours and feeling more like a miniseries than a movie, this version edits the Black Freighter animation back into the story, along with framing scenes of a kid reading it at a newstand, turning all the released material into a complete whole (not unlike the proposed IT "supercut").

The Ultimate Cut was marketed as "the complete story as it was meant to be seen", but Snyder has since stated that they had to "jerry rig" the Black Freighter footage in, that the Ultimate Cut is really for the completist "crazy fan" and the earlier Director's Cut his preferred version.