Watchmen arrived in 1986 and almost immediately fans began clamoring for a movie. So began a long, torturous production process that took more than two decades and ended with 2009’s controversial adaptation by Zack Snyder. Last summer, reports surfaced that after The Leftovers, Damon Lindlelof would be doing what many fans wanted all along: An HBO series. And, it turns out, they’re moving fast.
Look no further than Lindlelof’s Instagram, where he announced it in spectacularly nerdy fashion:
For those unfamiliar, that’s the retirement trophy given to Night Owl, the WWII-era vigilante who wrote a memoir that appeared in the back pages of the original issues of Watchmen. It comes into play as the comic considers how WWII-era social changes would have influenced, and in some cases warped, the four-color square-jawed heroes of the Golden Age.
It’s also a pretty strong indication that this series is, well, actually happening, considering that making anything involving Watchmen seems to be a struggle in Hollywood. Watchmen is seen by some as “unadaptable,” thanks to a mix of the Cold War politics that drove the original story and the dense, literary nature of the story which includes not just the main plots but fictional academic papers, interviews, obituaries, and other manuscripts that explain the backstory. On the other hand, this is also the network that took a movie about robot cowboys and turned it into a philosophical musing on the nature of existence and perception, and a showrunner who just wrapped up a show about the Rapture. If anybody can handle it, they can.
(via Instagram)