Folded:

• Saturday Morning Watchmen cartoon (commission this now. This second. Now)
• Lifegoesonintehran.com (remarkable photographs, all taken on a camera phone no less)
• Internet banking (never waste another Saturday afternoon queuing up again. You will probably lose all your money when someone hacks into your account, but by the end of this year you won’t have any left anyway)
• Crumbs! (when did she get so hot?)
• Wheelman (awful graphics, awful dialogue, absolutely terrific fun. Airjack, dude!)

Creased:

• Misery (been one heck of a week for it)
• Fearne Cotton vomiting her way up Kilimanjaro (looks like those nights spent slumped at a glass table are taking their toll)
• Dresses over jeans (ladies, imagine your man wearing his dressing gown over his jeans. Imagine how pleased you’d be. There you go)
• Only thirteen episodes per season of Mad Men (makes us mad. And it’s unlucky)
• People who always want to make you a cup of tea (we don’t all drink it, you know? How about offering a beer instead? Can’t think of a better way to mark 9.30 in the morning)

The real question, though – the question that could potentially lead to other beloved comicbooks being adapted into spectacular big-budget movies – was whether Watchmen could keep the weekend box office number one spot.

It can’t. Almost 70% fewer people saw Watchmen this weekend. So there’ll be less movies like Watchmen in the future, and more like Race To Witch Mountain. Bad news for serious geeks, but great news for creepy, perpetually adolescent geeks.

Race To Witch Mountain is the US weekend box office number one, soundly beating Watchmen into third place despite causing noticeably fewer comicbook geeks to foam at the mouth in anticipation.

And here’s why - Race To Witch Mountain actually looks good. It’s a zippy, action-packed movie starring a wise-cracking taxi driver and a couple of smart-mouthed kids who can move stuff about with their minds. We can’t speak for everyone, but we’re really looking forward to seeing Race To Witch Mountain. Admittedly we’re looking forward to seeing Race To Witch Mountain on ITV on a drizzly Bank Holiday Monday in the year 2038 because we’re buggered if we’re actually going to pay to see it, but whatever. Here’s the weekend box office top five…

1 - Race To Witch Mountain (Have you noticed that The Rock has gone from The Rock to Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson straight to plain old Dwayne Johnson? What a spoilsport! He totally missed out the stages where he had to be called Dwayne ‘Rocky’ Johnson, The Artist Formerly Known As The Rock, Rock-Rock, Drock Drockson, Thaynejohnsock, Little Bobby Johnnyrocks and Flarg The Indefensible. Disappointing) $25,000,000

2 – Watchmen (Oh well, so Watchmen was ultimately a Snakes On A Plane-style mistake where the online buzz built up by a painstaking promotional campaign couldn’t hope to sustain public interest once it was released. Never mind, geeks – at least there was one movie where a woman in a lycra jumpsuit got nearly-raped. That has to count for something, right?) $18,070,000

3 - The Last House On The Left (We completely understand why The Last House On The Left is a horror film. On our street, the last house on the left belongs to a couple of weirdos. We think they might be foreign. Scary!) $14,658,000

4 - Taken (We don’t know why Taken is such a weekend box office hit, you know – that little girl deserved to be kidnapped and forced into the human trafficking trade. She was following U2’s European tour, for crying out loud! That’s a fitting punishment!) $6,650,000

5 - Madea Goes To Jail (Similarly, we don’t know why Madea Goes To Jail is such a weekend box office hit. Honestly, it looks rubbish) $5,130,000

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9 - It’s Comic Relief this week, so here’s something quite cool about that – Facebook

8 – A SINGING DUCK! FROM THE PAST! - YouTube

7 - Get a lapdance off some lesbian vampires – Lesbian Vampire Killers

6 - Here’s a free single by the mighty Ist. Thank us later – Drop

5 - Remember Chronicles Of Riddick? No? Well it doesn’t matter, because it’s BACK – GFR

4 - Nasty, nasty, nasty sports injuries – AskMen

3 - An article about geeky bands written by someone strangely familiar - Shockhound

2 - Apparently Walmart now sell wallets full of human teeth – Fox

1 - Here’s Vanilla Ice apologising for the only good thing he’s ever done in his entire life…

So you’ll never guess what. Watchmen is the top weekend box office movie, outperforming all the other new movies like, um, oh. Watchmen was the only new movie in the US weekend box office this week.

Of course, Watchmen’s weekend box office success was probably down to Zack Snyder, who the Watchmen posters describe as being a ‘visionary director’. Proof then that you’re a visionary if you can film lots of angry people doing crap in slow motion. Better luck next time, Pythagoras.

It’s been a long time coming, and subject to all kinds of lawsuits and creative cul-de-sacs, but finally the Watchmen movie is here, and it’s number one at the weekend box office. Is this because Warner Bros successfully managed to galvanise the comicbook aficionados into thinking that Watchmen was a movie they couldn’t live without seeing? No, it’s because Watchmen has a big blue cock in it, and all comicbook aficionados are perverts.

Still, because of Watchmen’s success, several other beloved comicbooks from 25 years ago are also being rushed into production. Personally, the one we’re most looking forward to seeing is the adaptation of The Whizzer And Chips 1983 Christmas Annual. We hear that Sean Penn’s attached to star as Sid’s Snake. Exciting. Here’s the weekend box office top five…

1 - Watchmen (Watchmen is now officially the best-performing movie about a blue penis since that movie where Paul Walker got trapped in the snow with some dogs) $55,655,000

2 - Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes To Jail (Since prison-set movies are obviously doing well for him at the moment, Tyler Perry has just announced that his next movie will be a remake of Chained Heat, starring only adult men in aged female fatsuits. Sexy!) $8,800,000

3 - Taken (Do you love films where nothing happens for ages then a woman gets kidnapped and Liam Neeson goes to get her with almost no complications and then the film finishes? Then you’ll LOVE Taken) $7,450,000

4 - Slumdog Millionaire (If you had to make a porno spin-off of Slumdog Millionaire, what would you call it? Bumdog Millionaire? Slumdogging Millionaire? Slumdog Jizz In Your Hair? We need to know. Um, for a friend) $6,925,000

5 - Paul Blart: Mall Cop (We think we speak for every one here when we say “Blart? Blart? BLAAAAAART!” Again, we don’t know if that line is in the movie. We just know that it should be) $4,200,000

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But after Christmas always comes Boxing Day. That’s the day when you’re forced to eat leftovers and play with the toys you’re already bored with. And for Watchmen fans, Boxing Day might just come in the form of Watchmen 2 – the Watchmen sequel that’s been made up exclusively out the mind of a Hollywood executive who hasn’t read the comic books or seen the film and thinks the whole thing is about a band of part-clock mutants.

Or not, according to Zack Synder.

When a film becomes successful, people inevitably start clamouring for a sequel. It’s why everyone is talking about Batman 3, it’s why Million Dollar Baby: Zombie Boxer was released direct to DVD last year and it’s why Brad Pitt’s next movie will be The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button 2, which is all about Brad Pitt mistakenly trying to army-crawl up his daddy’s urinary meatus.

But mention a Watchmen sequel to anyone and you’ll most likely end up getting smacked in the face. The idea of a Watchmen 2 is unthinkable for three main reasons:

1 - Watchmen is a self-contained story with an ending, and any sequel would be made without the cooperation of Alan Moore, making it – if you’re a geek – borderline sacrilegious.

2 - Given the endless petty squabbling about who actually owns the Watchmen movie, Watchmen 2 wouldn’t be released until about a fortnight after the sun expands and swallows Earth up forever.

3 - Sequels are generally only made when a film becomes successful and, since Watchmen will probably only be watched by a small handful of comicbook obsessives who will immediately hate it from the moment it begins, that’s probably not going to happen.

But, hey, that apparently hasn’t stopped some of the bigwigs at Warner Bros trying to scheme up ideas for Watchmen 2. Which admittedly isn’t difficult, because there’s just so much you can do with a naked blue determinist god-figure, isn’t there? Like, maybe he could open a bakery with hilarious consequences or something.

Anyway, Watchmen director Zack Snyder has his own ideas about Watchmen 2 storylines, but they’re all deliberately rubbish to scare Warner Bros off. At least we hope they’re deliberate; JoBlo reports:

“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.”

Actually, we were leading you on a little there – Synder’s Watchmen 2 idea was a deliberately terrible one, and he seems certain that neither he nor any of the Watchmen cast would ever take part in a sequel.

And that’s noble and everything, but he’s obviously forgetting Hollywood’s flair for dividing and conquering – give it enough time for the roles to start drying up and we can guarantee that Malin Akerman will crumble and agree to star in Watchmen 2: Silk Spectre’s Festive Funcation. Just don’t come running to us when it happens.

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Because what would we have to be disappointed about then? The weather? Our jobs? The way we can’t grow a proper beard? No, Fox didn’t want to just block Watchmen – it wanted to block our right to be chronically disappointed by Watchmen, and that wasn’t on.

Luckily, though, the crisis has been averted. Fox and Warner Bros have resolved their legal squabble, and Watchmen is coming out as planned. That means our plan to slag it off before we’ve seen it remains intact! Yay!

Watchmen is undoubtedly one of the must-see movies of the year, provided that you’re a) a virgin, b) a pleb and c) so afraid of going outside that your skin has become the same colour as your bedroom walls.

And, to be fair, you’ve got every reason to be excited about Watchmen’s release – not jut because it’s a Zac Snyder movie so it’s bound to be brimming with so much latent homoeroticism that it’ll make WWE wrestling seem like an episode of The View, but because it almost wasn’t going to be released in the first place.

As we’ve mentioned before, we’ve had to put up with endless squabbling between Fox and Warner Bros over Watchmen – first Warner Bros made Watchmen, and then Fox said that it actually owned Watchmen and that Warner Bros shouldn’t have made it, and then Warner Bros was all like ’screw you’ and Fox was all like ‘no, screw YOU!’ and then Warner Bros said something about Fox’s mum giving blowjobs to sailors and Fox took Warner Bros to court to block Watchman’s release.

It all got very messy, especially when a judge ruled that Fox had an interest in Watchmen on Christmas Eve. Since then, Fox and Warner Bros have been in a series of protracted negotiations about who owns which part of Watchmen and, more importantly, how many frightened southeast Asian prostitutes they’ll be able to buy with their cut from the movie. Possibly.

But since this is Hollywood we’re talking about, it’s time for the happy ending. People, Fox and Warner Brothers have smoothed things over and Watchmen’s March release date stands firm. Reuters reports:

Terms of the agreement will not be disclosed, but it is said to involve a sizable cash payment to Fox and a percentage of the film’s box office, which Warners plans to release March 6. Fox will not be a co-distributor on the film, nor will it own a piece of the “Watchmen” property going forward. The studios are set to release a joint statement announcing the agreement Friday.

Well, this is good news all round, isn’t it. Warner Bros gets to release a movie that comicbook fans have salivated over for two entire decades, Fox gets a large injection of cash and, best of all, what with Watchmen AND Terminator Salvation coming out in coming months, there’ll be two movies this year that take a painful, slobbery dump in the eye of things we used to like. Hooray for everything!

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That’s if Watchmen is released this year, of course. Thanks to a petty squabble between Warner Bros (which made Watchmen) and Fox (which says it owns the rights to Watchmen), nothing looks certain any more. And now one of the movie’s producers, Lloyd Levin, has waded in on the issue by writing a letter calling everyone at Fox big old smellyheads. We’re paraphrasing.

So Watchmen still might not be released this year. That’s OK, we’re sure we’ll be just as disappointed by Terminator Salvation.

It’s hard to know why people are so excited at the prospect of seeing the Watchmen movie this spring. On reflection, we think we’ve boiled it down to three reasons:

1 - They’re gigantic Alan Moore fans.

2 - They can’t believe that the movie has actually been made at all.

3 – They’re stinking, lonely, friendless geeks and their only companion is their crusty ejacu-sock.

But forget the first and last reasons for the time being – much of the excitement about Watchmen comes from the fact that people have been trying to make it for 20 year. Terry Gilliam had a go at making Watchmen and failed. Darren Aronofsky had a go and failed. Paul Greengrass had a go and failed. Jude Law was going to be in it at one point. Simon Pegg was going to be in it at one point. Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to be in it at one point. Dig hard enough and you’ll probably discover that you’d been briefly considered for the role of Dollar Bill at some point in the mid-1990s.

Because of the immense amount of time that Watchmen took to get to the screen, it’s spent much of the last two decades being shuttlecocked between movie studios at an astonishing rate. Fox had it for a while, Universal had it for a while, Paramount had it for a while, Revolution had it for a while and finally Warner Bros ended up making it. And that’s where all the confusion lies.

Fox is currently suing Warner Bros with the intention of either cashing in on Watchmen’s release or stopping it completely, claiming that it still owns the rights to the movie. On Christmas Eve a judge ruled in Fox’s favour, and now Watchmen producer Lloyd Levin has been reduced to writing a letter online telling Fox to back off and let him release his film. The LA Times reports:

Lloyd Levin said Fox repeatedly passed on making director Zack Snyder’s epic superhero movie and was now trying to take advantage of Warner Bros.’ willingness to develop and produce it. “Shouldn’t Warner Bros. be entitled to the spoils — if any — of the risk they took in supporting and making ‘Watchmen’? Should Fox have any claim on something they could have had but chose to neither support nor show any interest in?”

With any luck, the coming weeks will see another round of court hearings to decide for good who owns what when it comes to Watchmen. We’d imagine that the worst-case scenario would involve Watchmen’s release being shelved indefinitely. But even that’s not the end of the world.

Look at it this way – if Watchmen doesn’t come out, the geeks will cry. If Watchmen does come out, it’ll probably be fairly awful and the geeks will still cry. Either way there’ll be some crying geeks. It’s a win-win.

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While normally this would be greeted with trepidation and a slight amount of fear, the sheer quality of the source material, combined with the fact that the film is supposed to actually be, y’know – good – has people sweating around the groin, awaiting next year’s release.

That is, unless Fox have their way and ban the film from ever coming out.

Oh, we’re not kidding here – that’s what they’re trying to do in the latest of legal battles that shows just how the company is actually forged from Satan’s testicles themselves. There’s evil, then there’s Fox evil.

This is the company that cancelled Family Guy in its prime – though they did bring it back, they actually ended up becoming more evil by letting the damn thing continue, seeing as it’s turned into utter tripe in recent years. Then there was the cancellation of Firefly, but we won’t go into that – it’s still too painful. They cancel, they block, they ruin and they devour, and they never seem to stop.

Next on their list is Zack Snyder, director of 300, and his adaptation of Watchmen, the classic 80s comic series that ranks amongst the finest books ever written. Apparently. With some nice spoof adverts.

The film is bankrolled and due for release through Warner Bros early next year, but some convoluted and complicated legal wrangling has revealed that Fox are claiming that they own the rights to a film release of the property.

While this came about in February of this year, well before Watchmen fever had truly got a hold of the internets, it has been decided recently by a judge that Warner Bros could not have the case thrown out of court as they had asked.

What this means is that Fox are free to pursue their copyright infringement case against Warner Bros, and are looking to get back either damages for the trouble – sure to be a few quid at the very least – or, in a worst case scenario, ban the movie from being released indefinitely.

And it looks like Fox’s band of lawyers, built as we all know from pure evil, are looking to force a worst case scenario – pushing to kill the project altogether rather than take some of its potentially huge box office. A statement released by Fox read:

“Warner Bros.’ production and anticipated release of ‘The Watchmen’ motion picture violates 20th Century Fox’s long-standing motion picture rights in ‘The Watchmen’ property.”

Which is pretty standard stuff until you realise they seemingly don’t even care enough to get the name of the comic right in the first place. So if they don’t even care about that, do they care about you, the fans – the public? Do they bollocks. It’s idiots in suits playing at running the world again, and it’s getting to be a bit annoying now.

But hey, at least Fox can clear the way for their own films to come out next year, and there’ll be no risk of them being compared side-by-side with Watchmen. That could be viewed as a good point. If you were mental.

The case is far from settled, though Fox are pushing for it to be fast-tracked through the courts. Probably so they can get back to stealing candy from orphanages, or burning down babies or something.

Today’s vitriolic rant brought to you by hunger pains and a lack of coffee. We will resume normal service shortly.

Comic book fans will no doubt be aware that seminal 1980s graphic novel Watchmen is making its way to the big screen.

What you might not know, however, is that director Zack Snyder commissioned an intriguing little competition for amateur film-makers to contribute to the upcoming feature. Entrants had to create a TV commercial set within the Watchmen universe – an alternative-history 1985 where superheroes have driven key world events.

Got some time to waste? Good. Then you can pop over to YouTube and have a look at some of the winning entries. They're all frankly fantastic, with a particular favourite being the spot-on toy commercial.

Oh – and is this the geekiest post in hecklerspray history? Very possibly.