Boycott Watchmen

The Watchmen film is coming out and you are its target audience. Movie studios are banking on the fact that fans will shell out cash for a name they recognize, and that they wont have to spare the product one modicum of dignity in order to snare your money. Its time to send them a message that some comics simply dont deserve the monumental disrespect that they will invariably be given on the big screen, The Watchmen being at the top of that list.

Send the most important message that a consumer and a comic fan can and boycott the Watchmen movie!

Long story:

There is a certain phenomenon that occurs in the American mind. Whenever a particularly salient form of entertainment rises to the top of its respective medium, a common phrase is always bandied about. Boy, this is an engaging book. This television show is exciting. This video game has me enrapt. It sure would make a great movie! When Jackson Pollack was destroying and rebuilding notions of art with the swing of his arm, he was hoping that his action paintings would translate into a pretty good action film. When Ray Charles was proving himself as quite ironically one of the most visionary musicians to ever live, he was sure to pepper his life with some hardships so it would make for a sellable screenplay. When the Biblical authors were presenting the story of Jesus, they tailored the character in the hopes that Willem Dafoe could be signed onto the project. Its as if people are convinced that the end-all be-all form of artistic expression is film.

The reason for all of this is simple: the movie industry rakes in tens of billions of dollars a year. The profits of the Harry Potter novels, the most popular book series in several decades, still lag behind the profits of their movie counterparts. It took the Spider-Man of print forty years to make the same amount of money that the Spider-Man of film made in three days. A great idea might make you rich, but a mediocre movie of the same idea will make you richer, and boy do movie producers know that. In order to keep it that way, they spend exorbitant amounts of money on advertisements of all sorts to convince the consuming public that a movie is the final step, the last plateau to be reached by the creator and their property. After all is said and done, it amounts to a win-lose-lose situation. The movie industry wins an amount greater than the GDP of most countries by getting your warm body into a dark room. The creator very seldomly receives but a fraction of that money, all to the tune of seeing their brainchild be perverted into a dumbed-down explosion-fest. And you, the viewer, lose by being coerced into seeing a cherished icon be ground and packed into the movie format like meat into sausage casing.

For fans of sequential art, discussions about good comic book movies invariably become exercises in the process of elimination. The best comic book movie is the best because it wasnt as bad as the rest. But, when all is said and done, its not like the distinction between good and evil here, yin and yang. The Punisher was featured in a few bad movies, but he was featured in a few bad comic books as well. Stupid, stilted dialogue said on film can probably be matched to stupid, stilted dialogue said on paper. The Ant Man movie is coming out soon. The corollary to that is: who cares about Ant Man, honestly? Theyre all just dumb, fun books and Ill go to see a dumb, fun movie. But what happens when the next comic book on the chopping block is the absolute farthest from dumb that you can get?

The Watchmen is viewed by most as the greatest comic book series ever. The criticisms of it only amount to its complexity, its forcing of comic books to grow up, and its boundary-breaking nature. To sum up, its too good. Now, I dont want to get overly dramatic here, but this is the last frontier in comics. The Watchmen is, in all reality, the comic-to-movie Rubicon. Once this property is stomped all over and youre left leaving the theater with a bad taste in your mouth and a sufficiently perforated soul, the quality of the next comic book movie wont matter. After that no other comic will be sacred, no comic spared. You hear they are going to make The Sandman movie with Jim Carrey as Morpheus? Yeah, and I wanted to get angry and write letters and stuff, but that Watchmen movie kinda knocked the wind out of me.

You might be thinking to yourself that The Watchmen movie, while not being good for the diehard, will be a beacon for the non-fan. Once Maynard G. Muskievote wanders in looking for a weekend turn-off-your-brain popcorn-seller and is subsequently blown away by what comics can be, hell become a comic devotee in an instant, right? If anything, watching Daredevil and Fantastic Four makes me want to AVOID those comics. Just ask yourself what you would rather be saying to someone who might be a comic convert: Yeah, I know the movie was dumb, but put that out of your mind and read the book. It wont be as disappointing as watching the movie, or simply Read this book. Its great.

It might be too late to stop the movie from being released, but its not too late to send the message that there are a few things that the movie industry is simply not allowed to stick its meat hooks into. Preserve comics for comics sake and tell everyone you know to boycott The Watchmen movie.

In a way, Im glad because it wouldnt have been up to the book. Dave Gibbons, artist of The Watchmen, upon the movies 2002 non-release

I met Terry Gilliam, and he asked me, How would you make a film of Watchmen? And I said, Dont. Alan Moore, writer of The Watchmen

(Some of you might be concerned that I am begging the question of the concept of a Watchmen movie being inexorable from the concept of a BAD Watchmen movie. In a way, that doesnt matter simply because Watchmen is made to be a comic. Alan Moore says I didnt design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldnt. Anyone who claims they enjoy comics should understand that the instant the movie makes more money than the book is sending the message that movies are always and without question better than the best comics, and I would rather see a movie than read a comic book any day of the week. But still, there are those among you that feel it could still be the greatest comic movie ever and you are sacrificing your own enjoyment. For those I will add a loophole: if, after its release, Alan Moore endorses it as a quality film and a faithful adaptation that is dedicated to its source, feel free to see it. Better to wait on the only acceptable movie review than to take an unlikely gamble with your eight dollars, right?)