Watchmen is one of the most influential comic book series of all time, and for years, filmmakers attempted to bring it to the big screen. Director Paul Greengrass recently revealed that his take would have been similar to Todd Phillips' Joker.
Greengrass was a guest on the Happy Sad Confused podcast where he discussed his take on Watchmen. "And don’t get me wrong, [you might say], 'Oh, like the Joker, and that I had the idea first because it’s not true at all and I thought the Joker was an absolutely brilliant film," the filmmaker admitted. "But there was something in ‘the Joker that had [a similar] quality to it. The Joker was in a real world, and he was filled with delusions, and [so the story idea was] superheroes’ identities were within people’s minds and were interior delusions as opposed to actualities. And the [movie] idea would have been where [the two ideas] join, if that makes sense."
Greengrass went on to note that he also admired what Christopher Nolan did with The Dark Knight trilogy, saying that Nolan found the perfect way of "grounding" Batman. "[Gotham] was the perfect place where you could make those characters live in a world that felt real and yet wasn’t real." Watchmen was eventually adapted into a film in 2009 by Zack Snyder, and also inspired a television miniseries on HBO developed by Damion Lindelof.
Joker stars Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, who -- through a series of circumstances -- ends up adopting the persona of The Joker. The film received critical acclaim and was a box office success. It even led to Phoenix winning the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Source: Happy Sad Confused, via The Playlist