Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a dark fantasy that explores the underbelly of the superhero life, has been enjoying a resurgence lately, thanks mostly to HBO’s limited series that imagined what happened years after the end of the seminal comic book. Before that, we got a much more literal — to a fault, many argue — 2009 movie adaptation from Batman v Superman director Zack Snyder.
But the original comic debuted in 1986 — that’s a long time for Hollywood to finally start making movies and TV shows out of it. As it ends up, producers had been trying to get a Watchmen adaptation off the ground for years, but it never quite took. The closest anyone got to making a Watchmen movie before Snyder was David Hayter, best known as the voice of Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid video games. But he was also a screenwriter who worked on movies like X-Men, X2 and The Scorpion King.
Obviously, Hayter’s version of the movie never made it into theaters, but he did make it far enough to shoot test footage. And it’s on the internet, ripped from a VHS tape and uploaded to YouTube for all to enjoy.
This scene — which we should stress again is test footage, hence why it looks so low-rent — is drawn right from the comics, and features the grimly determined hero Rorschach stopping by the apartment of Nite Owl, his former partner in crime-fighting. But what’s really fun are the cast members. We’ve got Ray Stevenson as Rorschach and Game of Thrones veteran Iain Glen (Ser Jorah Mormont) as Nite Owl!
Man, even in 2003, Glen was playing middle-aged characters who were run down and on the outs. Watch below:
Personally, I would have loved to see Jorah Mormont tear it up as a superhero, years before he became Daenerys Targaryen’s right-hand man on Game of Thrones. Patrick Wilson ended up playing the character in Snyder’s movie, and he didn’t show up at all in HBO’s series, although he was mentioned.
One more fun fact before we go: Although Alan Moore is famous for hating adaptations of his work, he kinda-sorta praised Hayter’s screenplay for the would-be Watchmen movie. “David Hayter’s screenplay was as close as I could imagine anyone getting to Watchmen,” he said years ago. “That said, I shan’t be going to see it. My book is a comic book. Not a movie, not a novel. A comic book.”
I know that doesn’t sound particularly complimentary, but if you know how Moore usually talks about people adapting his work, it’s basically a tongue bath.
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