Joel Silver reveals his planned ending for Watchmen

Joel Silver has taken a shot at Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation, criticising the director for being “a slave to the material”, and revealing the vision he had planned for the project.

Silver was developing an adaptation at one point, with Terry Gilliam in place to direct, and has spoken at length on just why his version would have been more of a success…

“It was a much, much better movie,” says Silver of his version. “I mean, Zack came at it the right way but was too much of a slave to the material. I was trying to get it back from the studio at that point.”

Silver goes on to explain how Gilliam would have altered the film’s third act, discarding the source material in favour of a less “silly” conclusion.

“Instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing, which was too hard and too silly, what he did was maintain that the existence of Doctor Manhattan had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure.”

“He had the Ozymandias character convince Doctor Manhattan to go back and stop himself from being created, so there never would be a Doctor Manhattan character. And in the vortex that was created after that occurred, these characters from Watchmen only became characters in a comic book.”

It’s certainly an interesting idea, although we’ve never really had a problem with Snyder’s ending. Let us know which version of the story you would have preferred in the comments below…