12 Cancelled Sci-Fi Moves We Wish We Could Have Seen
4. Terry Gilliam (And Everyone Else) Does Watchmen
Alan Moore’s infamously mercurial
magnum opus Watchmen went through countless potential iterations, some godawful
and some impressive (Terry Gilliam as director? Tom Cruise as Ozymandias?). The
eventual adaptation courtesy of Dawn of the Dead helmer Zack Snyder split both
fans and critics, but there was an early draft of the script which was
abandoned and we still wish we could have seen make it to the big screen.
Like Snyder’s film, this draft took liberties with the source material, but it was a mite more ambitious about its revisions. For one thing, in a bizarrely on-the-nose note superheroes were banned because of their failure to foil a plot to blow up Lady Liberty, and Ozymandias was plotting to travel back in time and assassinate a pre-transformation Dr. Manhattan.
If this sounds unrecognizable, the real kicker was the ending that, in Twin Peaks: The Return fashion, would have seen the eponymous superheroes end up in our reality.