Watch out!

LOS ANGELES — As invulnerable as superheroes may be at the box office, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen still represents a bizarre, costly risk for its creators.

“I took their giant, cool superhero franchise,” says Snyder, clearly more pleased than worried, “and turned it into a weird art movie.”

For Watchmen fans, that may actually be reason to cheer. Or at least heave a sigh of relief.

To them, Watchmen — created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons — is no mere run-of-the-mill action-packed comic book, but a genre- bending work of literature that redefined the borders of the medium. (A sentiment echoed by Time magazine, which declared it one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.)

Originally published in 1986 as a 12-part limited series, it imagines a world in which costumed vigilantes have existed for decades — and what their impact on popular and political culture would be. For example, while the U.S. and Soviet Union teeter on the brink of Cold War nuclear annihilation, Richard Nixon has remained president for four terms after the U.S. won the Vietnam war (with an assist from the almighty Dr. Manhattan).

Furthermore, far from the morally scrubbed likes of Superman, Spider- Man or even Batman, the protagonists of Watchmen are a uniformly disturbed bunch: Unhinged, delusional, murderous and even sexually impotent. The Fantastic Four, it’s not.

So is it any wonder that since its publication, the dark, dense tome has earned a reputation for being impossible to film? Producer Larry Gordon, who struggled to adapt Watchmen for two decades, looks at it this way: “We never thought of it as unfilmable,” he says. “We thought of it as unfinanceable.”

In other words, what semi- sane studio would spend north of $100 million on a comic-book flick which gleefully deconstructed its genre, was populated by neurotic, cowardly, homicidal characters, and was — while a legendary achievement among fan boys — largely unknown by the movie-going masses? Warner Bros., that’s who.

Warner is betting on that rabid readership — as well as Snyder’s stylized filmmaking chops — to make their subversive capes-and-cowls opus the first blockbuster of 2009. After all, just two years ago, Snyder’s hard-core adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 earned more than $450 million worldwide.

Hopes are similarly high for Watchmen, which opens across the nation this Friday, with Snyder the first to admit there was “no way” the studio would have allowed him to make Watchmen the way he wanted, if not for his newfound clout. After all, no one expected 300 to be a worldwide smash, either — least of all him.

“We were sure we were making a boutique-y movie nobody would want to see except fan boys and maybe people who go to action movies. It was a bunch of naked guys giving a history lesson — that’s the last thing middle America wants to see. It’s like a gay rave. But I said, ‘We made the movie we made; it is what it is, we can’t change it now.’ So they said, ‘Okay, we’ll get behind it and see what happens.’ And the same thing has kind of happened with Watchmen.”

Not that other directors haven’t courted the material before. Shortly after the mini- series was published — and in the wake of Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989 — Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam mulled helming a Watchmen film; a script by Batman scribe Sam Hamm was even commissioned, with Arnold Schwarzenegger mentioned as a possible Dr. Manhattan. When Gilliam dropped out, the project languished for a decade before a fresh script by David Hayter (X-Men) generated interest from Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream) and Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy).

“When a story is this good, it’s easy to adapt,” Hayter says. “What was difficult was the following five or six years of going to different studios and executives and protecting the material so it’s not developed into something unrecognizable.”

Ultimately Greengrass came the closest to getting the movie made in 2005, with a script that updated the action to the post-9/11 war on terror. But after spending $7 million in pre-production, Paramount abruptly scuttled the project.

Shortly thereafter, Warner Bros. snapped up the property and approached Snyder, who insisted the screenplay be “retro-fitted” to hew more closely to Moore and Gibbons’ original vision. Under his direction, the narrative was returned to 1985, Nixon was reinstated as president and the comic itself served as an elaborate storyboard of sorts for the film, complete with plenty of sex and violence.

Snyder also got his wish to populate the cast with unknowns — despite rumours linking Keanu Reeves to god- like Dr. Manhattan, Tom Cruise to super-celebrity Ozymandias and avowed Watchmen fan Jude Law to grim, obsessive Rorschach.

“There was a bit of talk at the beginning of wouldn’t it be cool to do like an Ocean’s Eleven version of Watchmen,” Snyder says. “The problem is, there’s very few big studio actors who would just hand themselves over to a movie. It just doesn’t work that way. And it had to be that way for this. You get a big actor playing Ozy and they’re like, ‘You know, I’ve been looking at the script and it would be interesting if Ozy had another scene. Hear me out. I hired a writer of my own and I think it’s pretty cool. So check it out.’ ... Patrick Wilson (who plays doughy ex-crime-fighter Nite Owl) was the first actor I hired and that kind of set the tone. Th e studio wasn’t happy, even though they love Patrick ... But my argument was, no one knew who (Gerard Butler) was before 300 either. The movie is the thing, hopefully.”

(And in the absence of stars, the studio has used Snyder himself as a selling point — — thus the tagline “from the visionary director of 300.” Snyder admits the hyperbole is “embarrassing ... They showed me the poster and I was like ‘Really?’ But they said, ‘Look, man, if you want us to keep our jobs, you’ll let us do that.’ ”)

More recently, there was the question of whether or not the movie would actually be released. Last year after filming had wrapped in Vancouver, 20th Century Fox, which once planned to make a Watchmen movie of its own, sued Warners over distribution rights. The issue achieved critical mass in December when a judge ruled in Fox’s favour. In the end, a settlement was hammered out between the two studios, but not before Snyder found himself pondering his film’s fate.

“Part of me, when it happened, thought it would be really cool if the movie was shelved for all time — because that would only make the movie cooler. Only 20 or 30 people had seen it at that point, so those people could go on a lecture tour and describe the movie they’d seen. I always thought cooler heads will prevail. You spend $150 million and then do nothing? It’s like, you’re right, the economy is out of control.”

Understates Gordon, “We’re very happy to have it on the date we picked two years ago ... I believed the movie god would make sure we were out on March 6.”

Maybe so, but it’s doubtful even that movie god would be able to drag Moore to see the finished product. The comics scribe has disowned the project and had his name removed from the credits. “He’s a wonderful writer who wants nothing to do with this movie,” Gordon says. “We would love for him to see the movie someday. But so far he’s made it clear — and it’s not just our movie, it’s any movie based on his material.”

(And considering past Moore-based movies have been League of Extraordinary Gentleman, V for Vendetta and From Hell, can you blame him?)

More collaborative, however, was Gibbons. Says Snyder’s wife and producing partner Debbie, “After 300 where we worked closely with Frank, it was nice to be able to pick Dave’s brain. He was always there for us. We were really lucky to have him.”

Just as they’re also fortunate to be arriving in theatres right after Th e Dark Knight proved there was an audience appetite for mature superhero fare.

“There is a place for an unusual movie that doesn’t tick all the boxes,” Snyder says. “You do get worn out by the same old thing. Audiences don’t want to go to another Fantastic Four movie; their brains won’t let them go.”