Watchman comic creator Alan Moore denounced the HBO series Watchmen which was an adaptation of his classic comic series of the same name
In an interview with GQ, Moore said the Watchmen co-creator, Lindelof sent him a self-deprecating letter that attempted to recognize Moore’s gripes while establishing a connection. “Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen,” Moore said the letter began.
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“That wasn’t the best opener,” Moore criticized. “It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling. ‘Can you at least tell us how to pronounce ‘Ozymandias?” I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I thought that Warner Bros. were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn’t contact me again for any reason.”
Moore continued:
I explained that I had disowned the work in question, and partly that was because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work. but which would be associated with it in the public mind. I said, ‘Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.’
As you know Lindelof went on to create HBO’s version of the Watchmen which was critically acclaimed. Watchmen led Primetime and Creative Arts Emmy Awards with 26 nods and won a combination of 11 awards, including Outstanding Limited Series, Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie (for Regina King), Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie (for Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and more.
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And while the industry praised the series Moore finds the discourse surrounding it confusing.
“When I saw the television industry awards that the Watchmen television show had apparently won, I thought, ‘Oh, god, perhaps a large part of the public, this is what they think Watchmen was?’ They think that it was a dark, gritty dystopian superhero franchise that was something to do with white suprematism,” Moore balked. “Did they not understand Watchmen? Watchmen was nearly 40 years ago and was relatively simple in comparison with a lot of my later work. What are the chances that they broadly understood anything since? This tends to make me feel less than fond of those works. They mean a bit less in my heart.”
However the cast and crew of Watchmen shouldn’t talk Moore’s words to harshly as he doesn’t support any adaptation of his work.
He criticized Wachowskis’ V for Vendetta, fought to have his name removed from Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, and has never seen any Hollywood project based on his work.
“I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work,” he said. “From what I’ve heard of them, it would be enormously punishing. It would be torturous, and for no very good reason.”
Moore created the Watchmen series in the 1980s and it ran over 12 issues run from 1986-87. He intended for it to deconstruct the idea of the hero, and says that all recent adaptations have led audiences to grossly misinterpret the message of the series—causing it to lose personal value to him.