In a recent interview with Wired to promote his spoken word set Unearthing, Moore claimed that DC offered him the rights to Watchmen this week, albeit with certain unsavory stipulations.


Here's what Moore said to Underwire:

They offered me the rights to Watchmen back, if I would agree to some dopey prequels and sequels [...] So I just told them that if they said that 10 years ago, when I asked them for that, then yeah it might have worked [...] But these days I don't want Watchmen back. Certainly, I don't want it back under those kinds of terms [...] I don't even have a copy of Watchmen in the house anymore [...] The comics world has lots of unpleasant connections, when I think back over it, many of them to do with Watchmen.


However, Don Murphy, the producer of the Transformers franchise and the film adaptations of Moore's books From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, claims that the author's embellishing things, as Moore doesn't own Watchmen — the Watchmen film got made, remember? Says Murphy on his website:

Alan Moore doesn't OWN Watchmen. Any of it. DC Comics does. It can do sequels now. And prequels.

And any damn thing it wants. So why would DC offer to give Alan back something in exchange for something it already owns???? [...] Once, many years ago, DC was going to do Watchmen figures. They asked ALan to support them and he did. They did this as a courtesy , not because he had any rights. ALan THEN went mental over some other perceived slight and withdrew his support. DC respected that and scrapped the toys. But by the time the film came out last year, they were done with his constant whining. They released toys, videogames, making of books, book marks and stickers. They could give a shit about Alan Moore who had become a sad, cantankerous Grandpa raging at the shifting winds.

In any case, Watchmen controversies are so last decade. Let's get a new Moore-related brouhaha for 2010, like who's going to release a $150 million Lost Girls summer tent-pole flick.