Watchmen sequel may be off the table for Snyder
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Silk Spectre, Nite OwlZack Snyder, director of the hotly anticipated Watchmen adaptation, sat down for his first interview with the New York Times after litigation between Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox was settled earlier this month. It's not long and not particularly enlightening, but Dave Itzkoff did ask Snyder if Warners was looking to him for a follow-up.
Surprisingly, the answer seemed to be no.
I don't know how you would do that. [..] Listen, they own the rights. If they wanted to go and hire some guy to make them a sequel to "Watchmen," I don't know that they would get any of those actors to do it, and I know that I wouldn't have anything to do with it. But they own it. They can do whatever they want.
It's not that Warners isn't on board with a sequel, or that they don't want Snyder to be involved for whatever reason. I think we all know very well that if Watchmen breaks even, they'll probably try to repeat the success of The Dark Knight and end up overreaching, or at the very least they'll run it into the ground with franchise fatigue, with each successive film distancing itself from the source and becoming more of a pure Hollywood creature until finally it's either relegated to direct-to-DVD status, or bailed on altogether.
Then, naturally, someone will come along in ten years and revitalize it like they did with Batman, so that the cycle can begin again.
Synder doesn't want a part in that, in fact he seems to go even further, bringing up his reluctance -- or outright refusal -- to do a sequel to 300 before Frank Miller writes another graphic novel to base the movie on.
"The studio wants it to be, sit with Frank, come up with an idea, write a screenplay, maybe he'll do a graphic novel based on the screenplay", he told the Times, "I'm like, 'Yeah, I want nothing to do with that.'"
There's a lot to be said for someone that willing to be true to the source material, that they'd pass up the chance to direct a film that's practically a lock anytime someone wants to green light it. But these things aren't worth very much if they are treated like priceless relics, locked in a vault somewhere gathering dust until just the right moment, one that never comes even as impossible-to-get opportunities slip by.
In fact, it seems unlikely that if Watchmen does good business, that Warners will wait for Alan Moore or Snyder to come around before launching a sequel and getting anyone they have to -- even if it means recasting -- to get another movie out there in such an uncertain economic climate.
While the wisdom of such is questionable, the potentiality is not.
Read the full interview at The New York Times.
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