Warner Bros. Animation has released the official trailer for the upcoming Watchmen Chapter II animated feature film. The movie, which is set for release on December 3rd, will finish telling the story of Watchmen in the most comics-accurate adaptation to date, using the acclaimed comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons as direct inspiration for screenwriter J.M. Straczynski. The first chapter snagged a 93% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes in spite of some harsh criticisms online of the animation style, which tries to hard to be faithful to Gibbons’s art that it can sometimes seem a bit uncanny.
Watchmen Chapter II stars Titus Welliver, Troy Baker, Katee Sackhoff, Matthew Rhys, and Adrienne Barbeau. It’s directed by Brandon Vietti (Superman: Doomsday, Batman: Under the Red Hood).
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This isn’t the first adaptation of Watchmen, obviously. In 2009, Zack Snyder brought the story to life as a live-action film, capping about 20 years of non-stop development on a project that some had called impossible to adapt. In order to boil it all down to a 3-hour movie, Snyder had to make some narrative and structural changes.
Around the same time the movie was released, DC put out a “motion comic” — directly adapting the comic book by scanning the comic pages and using limited motion and voice acting. That’s obviously as true as you can possibly be to the comic, but it didn’t feel especially satisfying for most viewers. An animated tie-in movie, Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter adapted the comic-within-a-comic from Moore and Gibbons’s series, and was later inserted into a lengthy “Ultimate Cut” of the Snyder movie. The Ultimate Cut, again, was aimed at being as true to the source material as possible, but there were inherent differences between Snyder’s version and the source material that didn’t go away just because there was more stuff in the movie.
In 2019, Damon Lindelof wrote a live-action sequel series, which aired on HBO and drew critical acclaim. The story picked up years after the end of the original comic book and did not share a continuity with Snyder’s version.
When it came time to make another run at a “true to the source material” animated movie, Warners turned to Before Watchmen scribe Straczynski. This time around, though, he said he didn’t plan on putting his fingerprints on the project. In fact, he urged Warner Bros. to credit him as “adapting” the story rather than “writing” the movie in the credits.
“By ‘adapted’ I mean strictly configuring the structure to work in a movie,” Straczynski said earlier this year. “I saw no need to write more material or change what works in the book. It’s pure Moore.”