10 Movies That Would Make Better TV Shows

For decades, Alan Moore’s seminal Watchmen comic book was considered unfilmable - not necessarily because of the content (although that would always have presented a problem to some degree) but because of the tone, the complexity and the sheer importance of the work.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest comic book series of all time, Watchmen couldn’t just be optioned and made into a half decent cash-in popcorn flick, as Fox did with the Fantastic Four and Columbia did with Ghost Rider. It’s the War & Peace of superhero comics, written by arguably the greatest comics writer who ever lived.

That’s why it took so long to be made in the first place, languishing in development hell for twenty years before rights hassles, filmmaking technology, a decent script and the money all came together in 2006, and shooting began in the autumn of 2007.

The resulting movie, released in early 2009, was an achievement no matter which way you look at it. Director Zack Snyder had steered as close to the original books as possible, especially in terms of the production and costume design. What changes were made were undertaken with the best of intentions, and in some cases still worked very well, and even Snyder’s insistence on his trademark hyperreal slow motion fight scenes didn’t ruin everything.

It was Watchmen… but it wasn’t. So much of the subtext was lost in the necessity to stick to the bare bones of the plot. After all, this was a movie two hours and forty-three minutes long as it was, and the director’s cut was over three hours long.

But even with some judicious trimming, it wasn’t enough. Critics applauded the effort, but generally, reviewers unfamiliar with the comic book considered Watchmen a bore, too faithful to the comic to be entertaining for a casual audience. Meanwhile, the hardcore fans bemoaned the elements left out.

Later home media editions restored the director’s cut footage, then added further cut material to nudge Snyder’s labour of love as close to Moore’s original as possible. But this is a feature film, traditionally designed to be seen in a single sitting. For all Snyder’s hard work, the critics were right - and so was Terry Gilliam, formerly attached as director, who had famously bailed out of the project declaring that the property should be made a five-part miniseries, not a single motion picture.

It’s debatable whether funding would have been available for such a project back in 2006/2007 - but if it was available today, HBO or Netflix would dump a giant alien squid in Times Square for the privilege of bringing a Watchmen TV show to the small screen. Expanded to fit the parameters of a cable TV show, designed to be seen in bite sized chunks, Watchmen could have found an obsessed audience on television far easier than at the cinema.