When Watchmen hits theaters in just about a month from now (on March 6th), will it mark the unofficial start of the 2009 summer movie season? Perhaps ... but what are we supposed to do until then? The New York Times has published a couple articles on Watchmen, with one being a straight interview with director Zack Snyder (his first since the legal dispute with Fox was settled, in which the studio will retain 8.5% of the gross receipts on the film and any sequels or spinoffs), and the other tracks the film's long road to the big screen.

Check out new images from the film -- including Jackie Earle Haley outside his Rorschach costume and a new poster (courtesy of TrailerAddict and Movie Spoilers) -- in our updated gallery below.



Snyder explains his changing of the ending (or the removal of a very large piece of it) by saying that, if he were to keep it as is, then that's 30 minutes he would've had to chop off somewhere else. Without spoiling the ending of the graphic novel, Snyder says, "Like, if you really talk about, What is the end of "Watchmen"? It's the exact same ending that there is in the book, there's no two ways about it."

As far as any sequels go, Snyder says he won't be involved in one ("Listen, they own the rights. If they wanted to go and hire some guy to make them a sequel to "Watchmen," I don't know that they would get any of those actors to do it, and I know that I wouldn't have anything to do with it."), but he does admit to almost creating a special comic with Dave Gibbons: "We never did it, but we were going to do a limited release Bazooka bubble gum. I wanted Dave [Gibbons] to draw a comic book for me, and you had to collect all of them to make it make sense ..." [continued after the jump]

[continued]
"...I think it's three panels per bubble gum, and you had to get 10 gums to make it all. And I was going to make a thing called Planet Rorschach. So you see this planet, and it's covered with New York City. It's like a planet of New York City. There's no suburbs. There's one giant Empire State Building, like Mount Olympus, in the middle of it. And hovering above the needle is Manhattan, blue, glowing. But the planet's going, "Hurm, hurm, hurm, hurm, hurm, hurm." You can't tell, it's this big, deafening, "Hurm." And as you get close, you go down into the city and the whole world is populated with Rorschachs. And they're all bumping into each other, going, "Hurm, hurm, no compromise, hurm, hurm, Armageddon." That's basically it. So I was like, "Is that the movie you guys want to make?"

On whether or not he's interested in directing a sequel to 300, Snyder says he'd only consider doing it if Frank Miller wrote another graphic novel, it entered the marketplace and people dug it enough to see a movie based on it. But what the studio wants is (according to Snyder), " it to be, sit with Frank, come up with an idea, write a screenplay, maybe he'll do a graphic novel based on the screenplay. I'm like, "Yeah, I want nothing to do with that." I have no interest in that. It would be like me going to Cormac McCarthy and going, "I have an idea for a movie: You write a book and I'll write a movie, and you can release it. You'll win a Pulitzer, I'll win an Oscar. It'll be awesome." Read more of this interview over at The New York Times website.

Finally, io9 dropped a new image today of Dr. Manhattan vaporizing some patrons at Molochs "vice den." Check out that image below, and head over to io9 to see a larger version.