Who wants to watch the Watchmen?

It was the summer of 1986, and I'd come back from the late lamented Rainbow's End, the best comic shop in Oxford, to sulk upstairs and read what, within half an issue, was obviously the greatest comic ever published.

After finishing The Dark Knight Returns I started on the first issue of Watchmen. It was perhaps the shortest ever reign as greatest comic ever. Watchmen was like nothing else at all. Sure, Dark Knight was wonderful, even if the bad guy was someone I'd never heard of, Two Face never having appeared on the Adam West TV show, but Watchmen was more. One was nothing but style, the other had both style and substance.
So then there was the increasingly painful slow trickle of Watchmen issues coming out, leading up to the frankly anti-climatic ending. It changed people's expectations of comics, with the rapid collected edition it changed the medium forever.

About fifteen minutes after the TPB came out the word began to get round that Terry Gilliam, former python, was to make Watchmen the movie. And so the story went for at least a decade without ever showing the slightest sign of becoming reality. The story kept bubbling along, a script would apparently be written, some funding would be secured, or lost, but in the end it seemed that the idea of a Gilliam directed Watchmen was something hard core fans of both wanted rather more that Hollywood, Moore, or the general public would want. And I was certainly with the general public on that one.

Why after all would you really want to make a film of Watchmen? It's too big, too sprawling to be crammed down into two and a half hours without stripping everything away. The whole thing demolishes the idea of superheroes, but without ever straying away from the iconography of the four colour comic. Film goers don't have that kind of vocabulary, the whole thing would surely need to be dumbed down. You could make a very bad film and call it Watchmen if you really wanted to, but would be be possible to make a good film?

Things have changed a bit over the years of course. It's no longer surprising to want to make a comic from a film, and some of them have even been quite good. It used to be that a superhero movie would have to be nothing but origin story, sixty minutes of introducing you to Peter Parker, his friends and family, and only showing a costume in the last half. Though it should be remembered that Watchmen is little but an extended origin story, even if it is one told entirely in flashback. It's no longer a mad idea to do a watchmen movie, but it still seems a touch meh.

Is it the case that a book has only really 'arrived' when there's a film made of it? I don't think I've every heard of anyone making a film of Paradise Lost, nor the Night's Dawn trilogy. Works of literature can be great works of literature without needing to be translated into other media.