So says Sci-Fi.com.
Zack and Deborah Snyder, the husband-and-wife directing/producing team behind the upcoming Watchmen movie, told SCI FI Wire that the film's final length hasn't yet been approved, but that it is getting shorter.
"We're getting really close," producer Deborah Snyder said in a telephone interview on Nov. 18. "We're at two hours and 35 minutes."
Director Zack Snyder added: "The movie's pretty long ... compared to 300, which was an hour and 58 minutes. The director's cut [of Watchmen] is about three hours and 10 minutes long. It has even more than the theatrical version as far as the detail that gets even closer to the graphic novel."
Zack Snyder has been trying to be as faithful as possible to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' seminal graphic novel, which tells a complex story of superheroes in an alternate-universe 1985 New York. The graphic novel interpolates other comics and book excerpts into its narrative, something Zack Snyder has been trying to approximate in his film as well.
Zack was shooting an animated version of the graphic novel's comic-within-a-comic, Tales of the Black Freighter, which is envisioned as a separate DVD release coinciding with Watchmen's theatrical debut in March. Eventually, his plan is to edit the Black Freighter material directly into Watchmen, presumably for a home-video release.
"The Black Freighter version of the movie that we're working on--which has the ins and outs of the Black Freighter comic book woven through it, with an animated version of the Black Freighter--will be about three hours and 40 minutes," Zack said. "So there's a huge epic version of Watchmen, which will probably come out after the movie's theatrical release, for hardcore [fans]."
Fans of the grahic novel know that a minor character in Watchmen reads "Marooned," an issue of Tales of the Black Freighter, in which pirates of the title pirate ship wreck a young seaman's vessel, stranding him on a deserted island. Surrounded by the bodies of his dead shipmates, the mariner concocts a gruesome plan to make his way off the island in a desperate attempt to reach his home, wife and children ahead of the pirate ship.
"As you watch it, you can have this experience where it's like the graphic novel," Zack Snyder said. "I haven't shied away from trying to enjoy the artwork. It's been fun to make some of those pictures real."
Watchmen opens March 6, 2009