Smash Cut

As Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox currently engage in their own superhero-sized legal brouhaha over which studio actually owned the movie copyright for Alan Moore’s acclaimed comic book maxi-series, I offer you fans another Watchmen-related duel: a battle of scripts!

I’ve written before in this blog about the fact that a whole slew of different directors and writers have come and gone while trying to bring the movie to life. I can now offer you a more specific look in the form of three rather different screenplays for the film.

Back in 1989, writer Sam Hamm, who was hot off of Tim Burton’s Batman that same year, was brought in by 20th Century Fox and producer Joel Silver to adapt the twelve-issue comics narrative into a screenplay format. Obviously, that version never made it much further than the printed page.

Fast forward a few years to 2001, when producer Lawrence Gordon and Universal Studios tapped David Hayter — a scribe who seems to have done a good share of voice acting work in video games and animation judging from his bio — to write and direct an adaptation. He completed a screenplay in July 2003, but then Gordon and Universal got into one of those pesky “creative differences” feuds and the producer took Watchmen away from the studio.

And that brings us to 2006, when Warner Bros. had (or claimed to have…perhaps a court is now going to have to decide that fact) the project with Zack Snyder set to take the helm. The studio roped in Alex Tse, a relatively young talent whose only major credit before Watchmen was the 2004 television gang drama Sucker Free City, directed by Spike Lee. Tse was brought in to rework Hayter’s material, and from most accounts this last bit of synthesis is what finally brought the movie to greenlight status.

For the curious, and those with a lot of time of their hands, I’m providing three different Watchmen screenplays below — one by Hamm, one by Hayter, and one by Tse (undated, so I can’t say it’s the “final” script) — and they mirror the evolution I mapped out above. The downloads may take a little while, as they total about 9.5 MB of material.

Sam Hamm’s Watchmen
David Hayter’s Watchmen
Alex Tse’s Watchmen

As a kind of addendum, I should probably point out that once filming began, Snyder tapped Transformers scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman to come in and do some doctoring, so you can bet that the final product won’t match up exactly with any of these scripts.