Paul Greengrass’ Unmade Watchmen Movie Was Like The Joker

Paul Greengrass’s 2009 unmade Watchmen movie was similar to Todd Phillips’ Joker.

Recently director Greengrass shared his vision and approach of the Watchmen’s adaptation. He revealed that his ideas for the film were very different from the final execution of Zack Snyder’s version.

Source: https://my3webroot.com/paul-greengrass-unmade-watchmen-movie-was-like-the-joker/

2009 Watchmen is a superhero movie based on the 1986 DC Comic character of the same name. The team of a writer, artist, and colorist including Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins created the maxiseries together. During the 2000s, Revolution Studios, Universal Pictures, and Paramount Pictures collaborated to adapt the comic book series. Director Greengrass was also initially attached to the project. However, the project underwent a development hell due to the budget dispute. Later the rights of the movie were bought by Warner Bros., and the studio hired Snyder for the direction.

The film was a flop at the box office and collected a gross of $185 million against a budget of $130 million. HBO’s popular series Watchmen used a few scenes from the movie to criticize Snyder’s approach to the storyline. In contrast, Greengrass claims that his approach to the film was different.

Paul Greengrass is a producer, director, and a former journalist. He is known for his signature style of using hand-held cameras. Some of his popular movies are Green Zone, Bloody Sunday, Bourne action/thriller series: The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Jason Bourne, Captain Phillips, and United 93. The director has won the BAFTA Award for Best Director and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director.

Greengrass and Joker’s director Todd Phillips share similarities in their working style, as both include the “real world” in their cinemas. And Paul Greengrass shares he wanted to create the Watchmen movie in the same cinematic tone of realism.

During a recent interview with Happy Sad Confused, director Greengrass revealed his ideas for the 2009 unmade movie and said his vision was similar to the 2019 film Joker. He shared that he wanted to believe that the comic book series’ characters lived in a real-world, and a lot of their doing and thinking was delusional. There was some quality of Joker to it.

The director considers that he did not get that job because he could not clearly describe his vision for the story. However, HBO’s Watchmen series had gained more critical acclaim than the Phillips’ Joker or Snyder’s Watchmen.