Trailer
Plot summary
The Cold War is at its height in an alternate 1985, and Richard Nixon is serving a fifth term in the White House. Costumed crime-fighters who once helped win the Vietnam War have been outlawed, and the Watchmen have retired, most of them hiding behind their civilian identities. Edward Blake, the Comedian, still works for the government as a black-ops specialist. Rorschach, a 45-year-old vigilante detective who keeps operating outside the law, finds Blake dead and decides that someone is hunting their old team. His former partner Dan Dreiberg calls the theory paranoia but passes it on to Adrian Veidt, who made his masked identity public and now runs a business; Veidt waves it off too. Doctor Manhattan, the physicist Jon Osterman, whose powers hold the nuclear standoff in check, ignores him as well.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Watchmen (2009)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jackie Earle Haley got Rorschach off a shoestring audition tape that his agent suggested, shot in the living room and kitchen of his own house in his little cheesy Halloween outfit. Snyder watched the tape and cast him, calling it very low-tech but awesomely acted.
- Crudup acted opposite his co-stars in a white suit covered in blue LEDs so that he gave off an otherworldly glow in real life, as the computer-generated Manhattan does in the film. The crew then 3D-digitized his head and frankensteined it onto the body of fitness model and actor Greg Plitt.
- Producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver started developing Watchmen at 20th Century Fox and later moved it to Warner Bros., the sister company of the comic's publisher DC Comics, hiring Terry Gilliam to direct. Gilliam eventually left the production and deemed the complex comic unfilmable.
- Fox sued Warner Bros. for copyright violation over a producer's failure to pay a buy-out in 1991 that had enabled the film to be developed at other studios. The two studios settled before the film's release, with Fox receiving a portion of the gross.
- Tom Cruise was interested in a part in Watchmen and met with Snyder about it. Snyder revealed in 2024 that Cruise had actually been more interested in the role of Rorschach, which had already been cast by then.
- Tales of the Black Freighter, the fictional comic inside the Watchmen series, was in the script as live action but became animation because shooting it in the stylized manner of 300 that Snyder wanted would have cost $20 million. The animated version was then cut as the film neared three hours.
SPOILER
Snyder changed the ending of the comic: instead of an extraterrestrial squid, Dr. Manhattan is blamed for nuclear devastation. Snyder figured it took about 15 minutes to explain the squid's appearance correctly, and felt that omitting it let him explore and develop the existing characters.
