It took tons of years for the classic DC graphic novel Watchmen to make it to the screen, with Zack Snyder’s movie finally arriving in 2009. There may soon be another version on the way. According to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Lesley Goldberg, Damon Lindelof is in discussions with HBO about developing a Watchmen series for the network.
Lindelof—who just wrapped up the final season of a different book adaptation, the brain-bleedingly under-appreciated series The Leftovers—has been a fan of Watchmen since age 13.
“From [Watchmen’s] flashbacks to the nonlinear storytelling to the deeply flawed heroes, these are all elements that I try to put into everything I write,” he said in a 2009 interview.
Lindelof also talked Watchmen gaining popularity beyond fans of the original comic with Observer in ’09, saying:
“There’s a little bit about that feeling of Watchmen, in terms of the fans, it’s like, I don’t really know if I want it to go mainstream. It’s like if you discover a band in college and you can go and see them and you can be right up against the stage and you kind of know the members of the band on a first-name basis and you can have beers with them after the show and then they break. And now they have a single on the radio and everybody is listening to them and now you have to buy a ticket to go see them in a coliseum…I want to keep it sort of insular. It’s okay with me if people don’t understand it because they don’t deserve to understand it.”
Lindelof and HBO are reportedly in the early stages of talks. The network and Warner Brothers Television declined to comment when asked to confirm that a Watchmen series was in development.
Watchmen was first published by DC in 1986 as a 12-part limited series. It was written by Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons and is widely considered to be one of the greatest comic books ever released. It helped usher in a new, more mature approach to mainstream superhero comics, and in 2005, it was featured on Time’s list of 100 greatest novels of the 20th century.
