March 8, 2009

Movie vs. Maxi Series

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Matt Yglesias saw Watchmen last night and says:

All-in-all, I’m torn between immense admiration for the film and regret that it was done as a movie at all. In retrospect, I kind of wish we’d instead gotten a 12 part HBO maxi-series that was really uncompromising and didn’t leave anything out.

You could think that about a lot of movies, couldn’t you? And I have! Which is a little odd since I don’t subscribe to HBO and wouldn’t get to see any of these maxi-series ideas if they actually got made.

Watchmen, of course, would present a challenge here. At least I think it would. The problem is that the original chapters are pretty self-contained and it really would make sense to keep them that way. So, one episode per chapter. Unfortunately, that would require a fair amount of padding. Most of the chapters just don’t have enough substance to take up an hour of screen time.

So a movie it is. I haven’t seen it yet, so I have no comment on how it turned out. But I’m looking forward to it even though the reviews so far have been pretty lukewarm. I don’t think I’ll be buying a Rorschach doll any time soon, though.

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