Concept Art from the Modern Day WATCHMEN Movie that was to be directed by Paul Greengrass

Before Zack Snyder made his adaptation of the classic comic book Watchmen, director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy) was developing the film project as a modern day gritty take on the Alan Moore graphic Novel. Now a few pieces of information and concept art have been revealed for the Watchmen adaptation that we'll never see. 

CBR talked to the production designer Dominic Watkins, who said they were working on a film that would have been more like Batman Begins.

I thought it was interesting because I thought we could do something very interesting in his style that hadn't been done before. The Nolan Batman hadn't been done at that point, so everything was still kind of very stylized.

At that time, I thought it was very poignant because it was written under the backdrop of Reaganism and all that in America and the Cold War being in full effect. I thought that the political climate from Bush was escalated to a similar point, with us on the brink of something quite catastrophic, so I thought making a version of 'Watchmen' that was more contemporary and applying it to the decade of the '00s was a good idea and was a lot more relevant than it turned out to be. I think the difference between Zack Snyder's 'Watchmen' and ours would've been night and day. He pretty much made the movie page-to-page from the graphic novel. Ours was definitely going to be based on the graphic novel and all the characters would've been drawn on that, but we'd have updated it somewhat.

It would've been done a little bit documentary-style, with a little news reporting mixed in. I feel like that would've been really interesting to see it as real-feeling as possible. Obviously, Doctor Manhattan was always going to be the biggest challenge to that. When there's a 50-foot blue man, it's hard to cinematically make it feel real. I felt they actually did a good job with that in Snyder's.

That would have been a very interesting take on the story, and I can't help but be curious to see what this movie would have been like, but I prefer the way that Zack Snyder developed it, which was as close as the graphic novel as they could possibly get. 

The studio spent around $3 million dollars on developing this film before they shut the production down. They were so close to shooting! The plans for this movie included a "f*cked up" version of the Owl Ship that was in bad shape, and buildings created by Dr. Manhattan that looked "very much like living atoms."

I would definitely head on over to CBM to see more of this concept art and to read the full interview, there's some pretty interesting stuff. 

Check out some of the design work for this watchmen film below and let us know what you think!