Snyder now battling to edit movie down from 3 hours....

[Spider-Fan]

I hope they do what the producers did to Lynch on Dune. I want this movie to be awesome, so I hope it keeps a longer runtime. If we get 3hrs, awesome, but if not, I'd still want something a tad over 2hrs and 30mins. This is a story that needs to to breathe.

 

[CrypticOne]

Snyder spoke at the Saturn Awards in LA on Tuesday when he picked up his award for 300 (best action adventure thriller).

He's now trying to trim his three-hour first cut of the movie....



source: http://blogs.coventrytelegraph.net/thegeekfiles/2008/06/watchmen.html

Saturn Awards full details: http://blogs.coventrytelegraph.net/thegeekfiles/2008/06/-new-york-monster-movie.html

I hope they don't cut too much out.

 

[xero1186]

Fitting Watchmen into one movie... already difficult. Making it less than 3 hours... ridiculous.

If a 3-hour long movie is good, people will go to see it. If a 2 and a half-hour long movie is mediocre, not many people will go to see it.

Quality trumps length. Especially in a movie like this with some action/violence to spice things up for the average movie goer.

agreed.

 

[Octoberist]

I hope that WB will okay with, let's say, a two hour and 45 min cut, which is what Synder is trying to do.

 

[Hellstormer]

TDK worked.

 

[Evil Twin]

Gone With the Wind was one of the best sellers of the 1930s. It was a bigger book phenomenon than Harry Potter. That was presold.

Godfather was a #1 best seller and didn't cost $100 million, even adjusting for inflation.

Lord of the Rings was one of the most popular set of books of the 20th century.

Watchmen, although I think beyond the cult niche many assign to it, isn't anywhere close to the presold cultural phenomenons those were.

I also think people way overestimate the amount of time it takes to capture the plot of Watchmen. I agree that there's a lot in there and a cut around 3 hours is probably best, but I don't know if the best cut is 3 hours, 2 hours 45 minutes, or 3 hours 15 minutes. Zack Snyder probably doesn't even know that yet.

 

[AVEITWITHJAMON]

I cant see how it cant be at least 3 hours, but i would accept over 2 and a half hours if get the longer cut on DVD.

 

[Dark Victory]

Watch the theater cut be like 2 hours and 55 minutes...but anyway I would love a 3 hour Watchmen movie as long as the scenes aren't too long like King Kong(I almost fell asleep when we would get a shot of King Kong wounded and Anne crying switching back and forth for about 10 minutes) but if you're going to cut stuff out, let it be the little stuff like in The Dark Knight.

 

[Hellstormer]

Watch the theater cut be like 2 hours and 55 minutes...but anyway I would love a 3 hour Watchmen movie as long as the scenes aren't too long like King Kong(I almost fell asleep when we would get a shot of King Kong wounded and Anne crying switching back and forth for about 10 minutes) but if you're going to cut stuff out, let it be the little stuff like in The Dark Knight.

O man, King Kong. I swear sometimes I'm still watching the piece of garbage.

 

[Project862006]

Lord of The Rings : Return Of The King was 4 HRs and 10MIN. Long and it made nearly 380 Million i say watchmen can keep 3hrs and ROTC was from New Line Cinema which is now with WB so i see no reason why it cant still be 3 HRS

 

[StorminNorman]

Lord of The Rings : Return Of The King was 4 HRs and 10MIN. Long and it made nearly 380 Million i say watchmen can keep 3hrs and ROTC was from New Line Cinema which is now with WB so i see no reason why it cant still be 3 HRS

Lord of the Rings:ROTK was 3.35 hours long.

Lord of the Rings: FotR was slightly less than 3 hours as long.

If Watchmen was a series of books, and the first movie was long but hugely successful - chances are WB would have little problem with increasing the theatrical length. That is not the case here, though.

Plus Lord of the Rings has a much greater established fanbase, and thus a far more bankable movie.

Again - WB is letting Snyder release his uber-edition, but I think Snyder also owes WB the most mainstream appealing movie he can deliver. A 3 hour movie is not going to make as much money as a 2 1/2 hour movie.

 

[Hellstormer]

You thing LOTR has more fans than Watchmen?

 

[Sun_Down]

You thing LOTR has more fans than Watchmen?

Of course it does.

 

[Katsuro]

You thing LOTR has more fans than Watchmen?

That's a pretty obvious fact.

But honestly, I think a 3 hour movie CAN work, but it all depends. King Kong didn't work, because the first hour was slow and boring as hell. LOTR, the first 2 at least, did work despite being really long. Even the third wasn't that bad.

It's just a matter of making the movie good enough to keep people from looking at their watches. That's the true test of a good movie, whether you look at your watch or not. Or i guess today your cell phone.

 

[RustyCage]

Man, it seems like every time I check on a thread here some sort of ridiculous (and if you ask me, outlandish) movie bashing is going on. Why does it always boil down to shredding viciously on some movie that really doesn't deserve it? Is that trendy or something?

"O man, King Kong. I swear sometimes I'm still watching the piece of garbage."

^ Seriously? That's ridiculous, that was his whole post. It had nothing to do with Watchmen, he was just contributing to the bashfest. I'm a little bit disgusted at that.. But I digress.

Watchmen has enough material and quality to cover more than 3 hours of film time. IF something was boring, I'm sure it'd be cut or condensed to fit this time chokehold Snyder's currently trying to put on the movie. So to reiterate, he's condensing something that would be way over 3 hours and might bore some people at certain points (this thread has a couple of examples) into something ultimately not boring - 'astounding', even - that's 3 hours or less.

 

[Hellstormer]

Calm down, apparentally you really need to walk around the forum a bit more.

O and if you're gonna walk in here and try to bash someone at least learn to quote so you don't look like you stumbled in by accident.

 

[JDym]

MTV: What's the current run time on the flick?

Snyder: Right now, it runs at around two hours and 50 minutes. I'm trying to make it shorter, because it's better if it's shorter, apparently. There is an online petition that says, "Keep 'Watchmen' at three hours." We'll see how that ends. Look, I just don't want to lose any story line, because you know eventually that's what happens. You start to have to cut characters out, and I just don't want to do that.

 

[CaptainGenerica]

I signed the 3-hour petition like many of you, but honestly I don't think it needs to be as long as three hours. It doesn't take that much longer than three hours to read it (less than four), but considering that A) reading always takes longer than watching, and B) a sizable amount of material is being cut, a 2.5-hour cut sounds reasonable to me.

I would say Snyder should forget about "long enough" and "short enough", and just make it whatever it needs to be to be good. As much as we fans hate to see things cut, it's actually quite possible that a more streamlined movie can be a better movie. Quality trumps length as has been said.

 

[Project862006]

the lowest i would go would prolly be 2hr 50min.

 

[laudanum09]

I signed the 3-hour petition like many of you, but honestly I don't think it needs to be as long as three hours. It doesn't take that much longer than three hours to read it (less than four), but considering that A) reading always takes longer than watching, and B) a sizable amount of material is being cut, a 2.5-hour cut sounds reasonable to me.

I would say Snyder should forget about "long enough" and "short enough", and just make it whatever it needs to be to be good. As much as we fans hate to see things cut, it's actually quite possible that a more streamlined movie can be a better movie. Quality trumps length as has been said.

but quality seems to tie directly into leaving things out. you can probably make a decent movie by cutting a lot of the story out or re-writing elements completely, but I for one don't want that, I want a movie that is an explicit adaptation of its source. the more it strays the worse it will be for me to swallow. so the more snyder can keep in the better. id almost rather take a huge sprawling mess than something neat and tidy. at least for a watchmen film, or rather THE watchmen film.