5) Terry Gilliam’s Watchmen
When Batman hit it big at the box office, studios started looking at comic book store shelves for the next big hit. Naturally, a lot of eyes were on Watchmen, the seminal Alan Moore-written graphic noviel that was released to near-universal acclaim in 1987. The self-contained story spanned five decades, about a dozen main characters, and was a philosophical and archetypal deconstruction of the superhero comic book genre. Naturally, turning it into a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster would be quite tough, if not outright impossible. In other words, it sounded like a job for Terry Gilliam.
Working with Batman screenwriter Sam Hamm, Gilliam tried to condense Watchmen’s sprawling narrative into a 100-page script, but aside from mining the details, there was the matter of a manageable budget. While looking at one of Hamm’s drafts, a producer said that making the movie would cost $1 million per page, and in the early 90’s, no studio was going to greenlight a movie with an initial budget of $100 million. Several drafts later, and no sign of a start date in the near future, Gilliam gave up on the project.
In the final analysis, that may have been for the best. While Zack Snyder was able to crack the Watchmen code in 2009, he took a lot of heat for changing the end by making Ozymandias’ peace plan to frame Dr. Manhattan for an attack against Earth rather than faking an alien invasion like in the novel. In Gilliam’s version though, Ozymandias wanted to go back in time to stop the creation of Dr. Manhattan, the result of which was that the surviving characters – Nite Owl, Rorschach and Silk Spectre – find themselves on the streets of New York, in costume, and mistaken for the comic book creations, the Watchmen.