How The 2000s Most Graphic, Hard-R Superhero Movie Was Destroyed By Its Warning

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 7 minutes ago

No one took superhero movies seriously until the early 2000s, when films like X-Men and Spider-Man proved they could be more than guys in spandex spouting corny dialogue. The early superhero renaissance reached its peak with The Dark Knight in 2008, a movie that proved that not only could superhero movies be taken seriously, but they might also be able to say something important.

Then, like it always does, Hollywood took things too far and started taking superheroes too seriously. The result was Watchmen, a 2009 movie based on one of the all-time greatest comics. 

It’s a movie about what happens to an alternate world after a high-profile assassination unlocks a conspiracy, a premise that may seem ideally relevant to anyone paying attention to 2025 current events. But it wasn’t relevant in 2009, and the mega-budgeted movie flopped at the box office after making fans everywhere angry. 

Could now be the right time to resurrect it, and give it a another chance? Stick around to find out how it all fits together, as we explore Why Watchmen Failed.

Setting The Clock In Motion

When Warner Bros. greenlit Zack Snyder’s Watchmen in the mid-2000s, they thought they were delivering a game-changing landmark. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 work is still considered one of the greatest comic books ever written. Naturally, Hollywood thought: “Perfect. Let’s make it into a blockbuster.”

There’s a reason iconic director Terry Gilliam famously walked away from Watchmen in the ’90s, calling it “unfilmable.” The story spans multiple time periods, switches perspectives, and intercuts comic-within-a-comic segments.

Compressing Watchmen into a single two-and-a-half-hour film was probably always impossible without gutting it. Director Zack Snyder tried anyway. He left in nearly everything, except The Black Freighter segments in the comic, and crammed it into one movie. 

Watchmen Begins With Assassination

The murder of Edward Blake, better known as The Comedian, sets Watchmen’s story in motion. When the paranoid superhero Rorschach investigates The Comedian’s death, he uncovers a broader conspiracy targeting costumed heroes. 

What Rorschach finds prompts scattered former heroes to reunite and reevaluate their past choices, as well as the conspiracy behind the Comedian’s death. His murder is the catalyst for everything that follows, symbolizing the death of moral ambiguity and the beginning of a dark reckoning with power, justice, and sacrifice.

A Visually Stunning Re-Creation Causes Confusion

Every frame of Watchmen is lifted, shot-for-shot, from Dave Gibbons’ artwork in the Watchmen comics. Lines of dialogue are ripped wholesale from the panels.

Watchmen is stunningly beautiful. The score is haunting and incredible. The performances are award-worthy. Characters leap off the screen. But it’s also an experience that was overstuffed and underexplained. 

It’s stuck in a cartoonish version of the 80s, literally. While the movie’s main characters are complex and compelling, the 1985 world around them runs on a childish version of good and evil, in which government officials twirl mustaches on the way to nuclear war.

Newcomers walked out confused. Too many fans walked out angry.

Zack Snyder The Stylist

Zack Snyder is a stylist, not a storyteller. He nailed the style of Watchmen. 

Dawn of the Dead showed Snyder could stage action. 300 proved he could create a moving comic panel. 

Watchmen needed more than his previous efforts. It needed subtlety. It needed irony. Snyder doesn’t do either. Some of it comes through anyway, transferred by simple replication of the comic. But not all of it.

He shot the sex scene in Archie like a soft-core music video. He turned the prison fight into a slow-motion ballet. 

Alan Moore designed Watchmen to deconstruct superhero power fantasies. Snyder embraced those fantasies.

Instead of seeing a deconstruction of superheroes, critics saw a joyless, overlong, ultra-violent superhero movie. It holds a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but just barely. Watchmen was immediately divisive. 

Watchmen Tried To Do More When No One Wanted It

Timing killed Watchmen almost as much as execution. It came out in March 2009. Just one year earlier, The Dark Knight had redefined superhero movies, proving they could be morally complex and critically respected. 

Watchmen tried to do more of that, and do it harder, but by then, audiences were ready for something lighter. In response, Marvel was starting to assemble its cinematic universe, leaning into accessibility and fun.

Watchmen sat in between Batman fans and Marvel fans, appealing to neither crowd. It was at the same time too grim and too shallow.

The Ending That Broke Watchmen

Snyder changed little in adapting Watchmen into a feature film. The one big change he did make was a huge mistake. 

In the original, Ozymandias stages a fake alien squid attack to unite the world against a common enemy. In the film, Snyder reframes it as Dr. Manhattan’s energy signature, causing global devastation, forcing nations to ally against him.

Fans hated it. To them, it gutted the weirdness and the satire of the squid. To outsiders, the Manhattan framing was incomprehensible. To be fair, the giant squid attack probably would have been incomprehensible to outsiders, too.

Still, instead of ending with a shocking, absurd twist, it ended with a muddled special effects sequence that felt like every other superhero climax. Watchmen is a story built around that twist. It’s why Alan Moore wrote the thing. When you build your entire story on one big twist, and then botch that twist, you kill your film. 

Watchmen died in that final act.

A Smashing Marketing Disaster

To know Watchmen’s ending was the problem; people had to see it. Getting an audience to see it proved difficult. 

Watchmen’s trailers were beautiful. Set to the sound of a haunting Smashing Pumpkins song, the ads promised something more than an action movie. They sold it as an experience in profundity. That was never going to work on average moviegoers, most of whom were only interested in superhero action. 

The Dark Knight had been profound, but WB slipped that in. They didn’t sell it on anything besides the movie’s cool special effects sequences.

The Watchmen trailers tried to deliver both simultaneously: incredible effects sequences and intense deconstruction naval gazing. It was too much for the average idiot. 

Opening weekend for Watchmen was big with $55 million, but the drop-off was catastrophic. By week two, audiences had abandoned it. The final worldwide gross of $185 million barely covered production, let alone marketing. In Hollywood math, that’s a loss.

Watchmen’s Modern Relevance

In 2019, HBO proved Watchmen can work on screen when given space, subtlety, and totally new ideas unconnected to the original comic. It just did it while ignoring the source material entirely.

That source material, and maybe by extension Zack Snyder’s movie, is suddenly more relevant than ever in a world on the brink of who knows what. Maybe it’s time to re-evaluate Watchmen..

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen failed as a blockbuster, but Alan Moore’s original story was always more than a comic book. It was a brutal, cynical dissection of power, how societies fracture, how leaders lie, and how the killing of a single man can ripple through history. 

In Moore’s story, Blake’s death exposes a web of corruption and triggers the unraveling of everything. The most chilling prediction Watchmen makes is that assassinations rarely stop at shock.

None of that erases the 2009 film’s epic failure. It was supposed to be the definitive comic book adaptation. Instead, it became a box office disappointment, a point of contention among fans, and a textbook example of why not every great story should be translated literally to film.

The irony is that Watchmen was supposed to deconstruct superhero movies. Instead, it got deconstructed by them.