New Watchmen Movie Happening, Officially Announced
When Peter Safran and James Gunn took over DC Studios at the end of 2022, they promised to bring audiences the best of the best. And, they’re proving that to be exactly the case as, during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, it was revealed that the team will be moving forward with an animated Watchmen project. According to The Hollywood Handle’s Twitter account, viewers can expect to see the group of heroes return to the screen at some point in 2024.
A Watchmen animated movie, coming out in 2024, was surprise announced at San Diego Comic-Con.
DC has been dominating superhero animated movies, with the recent release, Batman: The Doom That Came To Gotham, currently a hit on Max. There’s no word on if the Watchmen film will be a theatrical release, or join the other animated hits directly on Max. The news comes on the penultimate day of the convention, with eager DC fans hoping for more information about highly-anticipated titles to be on the way.
The Watchmen news is especially hopeful for members of the DC community as, to pushback against the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, studios, including Warner Bros. have threatened to push release dates for films including Dune 2 and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom back. With the reveal that the animated movie is set to arrive in 2024, there’s hope that the studio will do the right thing and continue to churn out content for those who have been waiting to see the fruits of Safran and Gunn’s labor.
Watchmen has been adapted twice, once as a movie by Zack Snyder, and again as an HBO series.
Watchmen has twice jumped from the pages of comics to the screen with a movie centered around the titular group of crime fighters released in 2009. Helmed by fan-favorite DC director Zack Snyder, the feature followed an alternate history in 1985 during the worst years of the Cold War when a group of heroes tried to solve the murder of a fallen peer only to discover that there was more lurking underneath the surface.
Boasting an all-star cast, the film starred Carla Gugino, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Malin Åkerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, and Jackie Earle Haley.
The film wasn’t a major hit at the box office and was certainly one of the most underperforming titles in the DC catalog, so when it was revealed a decade later, in 2019, that HBO was developing a series surrounding the characters, it came as a shock to many fans. Starring yet another impressive lineup that included names like Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Regina King, Tim Blake Nelson, and Don Johnson, Watchmen took place in present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma where a white supremacist group was raining havoc on the town.
The Watchmen animated movie is part of the DCU under James Gunn and Peter Safran, though it could be another sequel, a prequel, or an adaptation of the grpahic novel.
The limited series was a hit with critics, with the show garnering 26 nominations and 11 wins at that year’s Emmy Awards ceremony.
The animated Watchmen film is the latest project to come out of James Gunn and Peter Safran’s charge forward with DC Studios, with the pair also set to bring audiences titles including Superman: Legacy, Waller, Swamp Thing, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and The Brave and the Bold.
