Exclusive: Zack Snyder Talks About Why People Didn't Watch WATCHMEN

The press loves making up their own narrative to sell. Considering what it was, I thought the box-office for Watchmen was really quite surprising. I'd consider it a success.

I think quite a bit of 'blame' towards the audience/press' perception of what the film needs to be placed on the trailers. They got a nice weekend due to the marketing, but general audiences did not get what they were expecting. Some people react positively to such a 'surprise,' but most people get pissed off.

People like Nikki Finke are terrible. There was no reason anyone's expectations should have been based on the opening weekend of 300. It wasn't a sequel. The amount of money it made was a minor miracle. I'm not saying it made the bean counters happy or the movie was profitable, but it could have gone much worse. Saying a movie is "from the director of ______" has a minor effect at best.

I find that the general public, those who don't hang out on movie sites all day, will relate past pictures with a director's name. They know so few and ones like Zack Snyder, whose name was bandied about a lot during the success of 300, was definitely one that stuck in their mind. But unfortunately, they get to thinking director's are capable of only one thing, except maybe...Spielberg or something. So when they see 'Zack Snyder' they think 'blood, action and effects'. I had one co-worker, a normal average moviegoer come in and go 'Watchmen was not what I expected.' 'Well, what'd you expect?' 'You know...more action, I guess, like 300.'

I did die a little when he said that.

"The problem seems to be that the press never fully understood what this movie was."

Well, that's one version of the story. The other is that the movie plain sucked. I know it's got a big fan base on the site, but Snyder's movie was as tone deaf to Moore's overall vision and themes as his 'zombie baby' was to George Romero's conceptualization of 'Dead' America.

Moore's book did elevate the superhero story to a Godfather-like tragic tale--Snyder cut out everything that made that book unique, turning Watchmen into a normal superhero film, albeit one with too many characters, too much blue penis, and too many pop songs.

For Snyder, or Devin, to blame the movie's failure on anything other than its lack of nuance is the real joke here.

God, that was a depressing article, especially this passage: And Transformers being a juggernaut isn't helping.

Who will watch the watchmen?

Nobody. As fan of film i found Watchmen to be one of the worst films of the decade. I have never read the graphic novel. I never cared to, but I was very excited about the film. To me this is one of the most frustrating films i have ever seen. It is so great at times, but then again it so awful at other times. It is just painful to watch how close he was to making a great movie. i won't get into a review of the film that has been done elsewhere. But to be honest I think you are putting too much on the audience. Sure they are idiots, but they aren't always wrong. Sometimes a bad film is just a bad film and people don't like wasting their money.

Point taken.

But a little nuance would've helped word of mouth. Everyone I know who saw Watchmen disliked it--fans of the novel or no. The folks who didn't read the comics came away thinking that all the characters had powers, for chrissakes. Meaning Snyder failed on the most basic level of explaining to people who they were watching and why.

A movie like The Hangover breaks out because people like it, and tell their friends. Same with Star Trek or Up, and even 300. If a property is unknown, as Watchmen was, to the public at large, something notable about the film has to get it over that hump. Watchmen had nothing on that account. Nuance would've done it, imo.

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I don't really think it's about audiences seeking dumber fare, it's just that dumber fair let's in more kids. If we took kids out of the equation completely you'd have very fair box office results.

You can pick on that word all you want, Dev. I haven't seen The Hangover and don't know shit about it. I do know that Snyder might as well be sucking the fumes from Galafinakalaka's tail pipe, box office wise.

The point was Watchmen was an unknown property and, you know, people liking it might have helped it put butts in the seats. Problem being, people didn't like it and they told their friends. Maybe if Snyder had focused on telling a story, instead of recreating comic panels, the movie might've done better. But I guess we'll never know.

The Hangover is successful because it's short, easy, and satisfying. Nuance doesn't enter into it.

Watchmen was the opposite of that. That is simply the way it is when it comes to this story. It had a tough hill to climb and did pretty well for itself, regardless.

Your point about EVERYONE you know disliking it is anecdotal. It's about as ridiculous as me using 'Everyone I know loved it!" to support my point.

The movie just didn't work as a stand-alone narrative. It was not an interpretation of the graphic novel, it was not an adaptation for a different medium, it was just an illustration of the book, a series of moving pictures re-enacting the events of the book and nothing more.

And Snyder was so precious in his attempts to maintain a visual consistency that he completely lost sight of all narrative nuances (whoops, there goes that word again).

It's been said a million times and should be said a million more. Nite Owl and Silk Spectre killing those hoodlums, for example, completely betrayed the character dynamics and the whole bloody point between an idealised and frankly naive and infantile view of crime-fighting and problem-solving -as championed by the aforementioned heroes- and the more pragmatist, shades of gray morality birthed by the Comedian and brought to its apogee by Veidt.

Simply put, Snyder didn't get that it was not the pretty pictures that made the book. Unlike Frank Miller's work.

I think The Watchmen fell into the same trap Kingdom of Heaven did, an ambitious difficult movie coming after a previous relatively simple and easy to digest crowd pleaser from the same director (300/Gladiator) with unproven star power (entire cast/Bloom).
The advertisers didn't know how to sell it as intelligent movie and just sold it as another crowd pleaser and when the audience learnt they'd been tricked in the cinema there was a minor backlash (I tried to warn my mates weeks in advance that it wasn't as action heavy as 300 and to think of it more in the frame of V For Vendetta, those who understood this enjoyed it a lot more in my experience).
Edit: Even though I do think Snyder made some slight mistakes which were to to the detriment of the story (the casting of Ozymandias really would have worked better with a known nice guy and played a little cold/not really getting a good sense of the aftermath of the ending) but overall as has been said often he did the best he could with a very deep nuanced story and diluted it to the furthest extent he could that would stay true to the story and not alienate audiences even more.

Well, I wouldn't say NOBODY liked it. Some folks sure did. Even I LIKED it. But it really did not connect with audiences. The reasons why are many but laying all the blame at the door of the audience is not the way to go. Movies like Transformers will always put the asses in the seats because they are playing it easy. Watchmen played hard and I respect it for that. But the end result seemed lacking in some very key departments such as tone, character and thematic implication. It is a wonderful failure. Pauline Kael says something very similar about Bertolucci's 1900. I would take Synder's failure over Bay's success any day.

Couldn't agree more, Mastron.

The film was a terrible adaptation, but that has VERY little to do with its box-office failure.

So a hard film to sell underperformed and we're declaring the end of cinema?

For sure, its anecdotal. I'm not saying people didn't enjoy it, I just don't know those people. The people I do know, at best, told others to wait for the Director's Cut DVD, if they recommended seeing it at all.

The Hangover, Star Trek, and Up are all doing so well because there's little box-office drop off (thanks BO wizard Dellamorte!), and that's because of word of mouth. Watchmen just couldn't bring it. And, imo, that's just because is wasn't very good.

Incidentally, interest in the graphic novel increased greatly around the movie's release, both before and after, because fans told others to read the book and skip the film. (This info from a reliable source, a friend who owns a comic shop, loves the book, and hated the movie). Obviously box office numbers aren't comparable with comic sales, but the point is that sales numbers do reflect public interest, and are often effected by word of mouth.

Plus there were some really regrettable and odd stylistic choices that just wouldn't fly with anyone not already invested in the novel. Like Moloch's ridiculous elf ears.

And the humanity displayed in the source material was noticeably absent: The little people in Times square, the psychologist's wife and his breakdown, Rorschach sparing his landlady because of her kids.

I agree with the argument that the movie just wasn't good enough. I thought Snyder was slavish to the source material in a way that suggested he was afraid to interpret/re-interpret, or to deviate in any significant way, lest he reveal a lack of understanding.

Of course, he did end up misinterpreting in some of the ways that he chose to deviate from the book, which just confirms my suspicion. The ending need not have been changed a hair if the movie had carried over the absurd, vaguely Strangelovian tone of the comic. I think that's one of the things the film was sorely lacking: a sense of humor. It took the book as seriously as the most devoted but clueless fanboy, seeming not to recognize that one of Moore's themes was the inherent ridiculousness of superheroes and costumed vigilantes as a concept. Instead, he "cooled" it up, and tarted-up a lot of the violence and other titillating aspects.

Way too little satire, tonally speaking.

Now, this alone wouldn't keep the average person away, except that it resulted in a movie that felt like it didn't know what it wanted to be. A kick-ass superhero movie that didn't have any of the type of kick-ass set-pieces that the non-fans would likely be looking for, and a stylistically dumbed-down intellectual exercise.

I think this movie could have made more of a splash by word-of-mouth if it had made a commitment to something more than just aping the pictures on the pages of the GN. It may not have inflated the box office by much, but it certainly might have helped the film do better critically.

And this is the kind of movie that really needed some generally unanimous praise to get it out of the fanboy ghetto and into the minds of everyone else, sort of how things worked out for Batman Begins. 64% on Rotten Tomatoes is not very enticing to the casually curious.

I must admit after the initial 'wow' of seeing the film, I started to realise it was kind of hollow and not particularly great. It's generally speaking not a very good movie, it's just an extraordinarily well made and well shot, not good movie and I think that aspect of it had more of an impact than anything else.

I have to agree that Dan and Laurie killing those thugs resonated as one of the bigger ball=dropped moments in the movie. For my money, I enjoyed it as a whole but found many changes of material or emphasis to be stupid mistakes as opposed to honest adaptive choices. I don't know if I look at it that way because I'm such a huge fan of the GN or not, but there you go.

I'd say that one of the unsung casualties in the audience were casual fans of the GN whose uniform complaint was "the book is better". Well, duh. A lot of people I know who've read and enjoyed the book and sort of jumped onto the bandwagon with others who own it and read it regularly and are invested fans. These people seemed to expect the movie to BE the book. I found myself playing devil's advocate for a movie I have mixed feelings about just because most of the complaints were so stupid.

I think you can lay a lot of the blame for Watchmen's lack of impact (fuck commercial success and all other forgone conclusions) at the feet of the audience.

This wasn't a box office juggernaut, but art films seldom are.

If this were some French sci-fi epic and it made 120 million dollars people would be going nuts. But it was a complicated film made with studio money. I agree with Devin, all things considered this was a success.

An interesting thing I noticed is how it was perceived down here. It opened a couple of weeks ago. I helped out a little with its promotion and it caused a bit of a minor sensation. This surprised me, considering the story is so deeply rooted in American culture.

But people connected with it. Ozymandias, as portrayed in the film, does have a passing resemblance to Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera - and the character shares a similarly utopian world view... Plus the homosexual undertones (Most have come to accept that our VP is a closet homosexual). This has clearly resonated with people.

I don't know that it was possible for Watchmen to do any better than it did no matter how good it is or isn't. (I happen to think it's brilliant as well) I'm just glad we're getting a spectacular Blu Ray release in a month. That WB continues to invest and push for this kind of thing, surely must mean they understand the longevity potential.

That's not an opinion, that's a nit-picky quip. And it is a reliable source, in that the store's numbers don't lie--more Watchmen books sold, and these numbers were reflected by sales trends at large.

And your whole story is based on anecdotal evidence, from your opinions to those of the directors, and an 'anecdote' only becomes a reliable source by being published on the front page of this site, and not in the talkback. You could have done real reporting about why Watchmen failed, instead you asked a friend. And then published it as news.

Funny you should mention that. Many people picked up on the Strangelove aspect of the story through the way the war room scenes were staged. The people I'm talking about had not read the book.

You didn't think the movie was funny? It has a serious tone, but it juggles pulp genres in much the same way the book does. Part Superhero adventure, part hard-boiled detective yarn, part existential sci-fi, part satire.

The film's detractors are entitled to their opinion. But they're not giving it credit for how ambitious it really is. I don't think this movie could ever have broken through unless they had gone out of their way to make it more accessible for mainstream audiences. And if they had done that, the film would have made more money but all the fans would have been pissed.

You can't please everyone.

Please don't suggest that the public at large really cares about this.

That just says more books were sold. It doesn't say it was because people were told to skip the movie and did.

Well, when you put it that way...you're totally right.

Well that was easy.

I do think it was perhaps a bit personal in that some critics were obviously waiting to take down this so called "visionary director".

But, in the big picture, a nearly 3 hour long, dark, R-rated version of Watchmen was made and grossed over $100 million. There was some late irrational exuberance about how big it could be, but taking a step back that still looks like a win to me.

I agree with basically everything in that piece Dev and the perception of Watchmen, especially in the mainstream media (moreso in the US than here) along with its reception by the public, combined with the contrast of Watchmens performance and Transformers simply helps solidify for me the death of heart, brain and passion in big budget movie making in modern Hollywood.

...and I won't pretend it doesn't depress the hell out of me.

I know you don't normally comment on your pieces in threads like this, but I have to ask was that passing comment "Here, at the end of cinema,", a bit of a hyperbolic flourish, or do you really feel we're at a specific and rather depressing moment in mainstream American film as well?

My co-worker called me after he saw it and told me that he walked out because the 'blue guy was walking around naked and thats gay'. I didn't say anything in response and hung up the phone.

How is it that this gentleman has access to your phone number and why would he call you?

Please don't tell me he's your friend.

I may not have liked the film much, but it did about as well as I think a Watchmen movie ever would have done. That's why I didn't get why Snyder spent such a huge budget on this. It should have been a niche movie like Sin City or V For Vendetta, with an equivalent budget. Then it would have been considered a success in the theaters.

I'm sure this will sell briskly on DVD, but...does anyone else get the sense that this is one of those adaptations that will never get out from under the material it's adapting? I mean, I feel like, in 10 years, the Watchmen fans will still be mostly talking about the book, and the movie will just be something that's out there. Which is hardly bizarre, except that I feel like a lot of these non-superhero graphic novel adaptations HAVE taken over from their sources in the public consciousness, particularly Sin City, 300, and V For Vendetta.

I have no idea. He must have looked at the contact list on my boss's desk that is conveniently kept posted for everybody to see. I wore my Watchmen shirt to work one day and he 'just had to tell me about it'.

He is NOT my friend.

Some media outlets were a bit unfair about the box office, I think. I remember the day after Watchmen's opening weekend, Yahoo! had an article on the front page saying the film did okay but was WAY under the sort of cash that The Dark Knight raked in initially. Outside of the fact that both films deal with superheroes, I don't think there's much else to compare. The Dark Knight seemed to come up a lot actually for awhile there, and it just amazed me that people thought Watchmen would be seeing those types of numbers.

Good thoughts on the film, Devin. While I wouldn't call the press's reaction "personal", I did sense a lot of baggage being carried into the theater. Many reviewers seemed offended at Hollywood's present comic fixation, and Watchmen is one of the most prominenant examples of that. A lot of them saw the film, being so faithful to the source material, as an opportunity to stick it to the fanboys. You saw that mantra over and over again, "It's crippled because it cares so much about the comic!" I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. They wanted to protest about the state of film in general, which of course has nothing to do with the goddamn movie.

In the end the film reached and was appreciated by those who deserved it.

I think it's a little weird to decry the death of intelligent film when over the last four years we've had films like The Fountain, The Squid and the Whale, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, Little Children, Hunger, No Country For Old Men released. Even something like the Dark Knight could be classed as an intelligent film.

It's just that audiences reacted badly to Watchmen because those who read the book found the film devoid of the intelligence of the work, and those that hadn't seen the book were primed for a film that was more esoteric than the occasionally goofy film that was provided. Audiences didn't react badly to the film because it was 'intelligent', they reacted badly because the last moments of the film had that goofy zoom on Ozymandias to a piece of Mozart, because it had Nite Owl on his knees screaming 'nooooooo', because it had previously has a sex scene scored to Hallelujah. What was apparent in Watchmen the movie was the goofier, melodramatic elements of the book, not the intelligence.

Oh right, didn't read properly. Yeah, of those films only really No Country and There Will Be Blood had any real impact and that was largely due to one becoming a meme and the other essentially disguising itself as something else. So sorry, my misunderstanding.

Were you guys watching movies in the 90's? Big studio blockbusters were just as stupid then. On the whole, I'd say more so.

That is true. By and large, there are more Blockbusters of worth in the 00's than in the 90's. Hell, I'm struggling to think of very many of all that still hold up from the previous decade.

I've been saying that for a while. As stupid and terrible as modern blockbusters can be, most of them have a good idea or an interesting filmmaking decision buried somewhere in them. In the 90s there was tentpole flick after tentpole flick about nothing whatsoever.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the 90s were Bay's heyday. His Bayday, if you will. If TF2 is the nuclear bomb of terribility that everyone says it is, I'd say he's simply reverted to his classic mode (after a few feeble stabs at something more).

Good piece Devin.

But damn there are still some stupid fucking people around here.

Sure, but that (de?)evolution hasn't exactly been a straight line. "Lord Of The Rings", "Spider-Man 2", even "300" are a giant leap over things like "Independence Day". Blockbuster films of substance have been mixed in with the crap the last few years. During the '90s it was mostly the latter.

EDIT: Spelling