Will there be a Watchmen season 2? Latest news
Find out everything you need to know about the future of Watchmen, the hit comic book superhero sequel
Who watches the Watchmen? Everybody, it seems - and they're having a great time doing it.
HBO's high-budget adaptation of - and sequel to - Alan Moore's seminal comic Watchmen has been a smash hit, with critics praising the series for its storytelling and invention.
Naturally, fans of the show, which shows on Sky Atlantic in the UK, have started wondering whether Watchmen will be given a second series.
Though creator Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers) has given interviews entertaining the possibility of another season, he recently announced it was unlikely.
Find out everything we know about Watchmen's future below...
Will there be a second season of Watchmen?
A second season of Watchmen could be on the cards - but not with Lindelof at the helm.
The showrunner has said that he would support someone new taking over the reigns for a potential season two.
"I would facilitate and embrace and do everything in my power to enable others to come forward and show their take on Watchmen," he said in an interview with ComicBook.com.
He added, "I hope there's more Watchmen. I don't think it should be me."
However, Lindelof had previously spoken out about how the first season was designed to be relatively self-contained, just as Alan Moore's original graphic novel was. As a result, there may not be scope for a second season in the immediate future.
He told Entertainment Weekly: "I wanted everyone to know this is not the middle of the trilogy, this is not the beginning of a seven-season run. In my opinion, the best iteration of any season of Watchmen would mirror the original [graphic novel] in that it would be a self-contained story with the resolution of a fundamental mystery.
He added: "There’s always going to be space for more Watchmen. I feel like this world is so expansive — hopefully more expansive now than it was before."
In January 2020, Lindelof admitted that he has no intentions to return to the project at present, although he did give his blessing for HBO to continue in his absence.
“I never wanna close the door completely because if two, three years from now I say, I just had another idea, it will be that much harder to open. But I would say it’s barely ajar. I think that there are no current plans to make any more Watchmen. If the idea comes, I would be enthusiastic about it, the idea may not come from me. I would be super excited about it coming from someone else. So my position hasn’t changed,” Lindelof told Deadline at the WGAW Awards.
Given that many of the characters manage to survive the events of season one, there's still plenty of possibilities for extending the story. And with the reception as strong as it's been, HBO will likely be interested in a follow-up.
When would a second season of Watchmen be released?
Assuming a second season does get produced, we might have to wait a while. Lindelof told metro.co.uk that the writing team hadn't saved any ideas for use in a future season, instead cramming everything they could into the existing nine episodes.
Because Watchmen is a revisionist sequel, rather than a straight adaptation, there is the need to create an entirely new plotline - so filming on season two has to wait until the writing staff comes up with one.
"I haven’t had any ideas of what subsequent series of Watchmen would be," the creator said. Until those ideas come, I’m content with just letting this one sit out there for a while."
Would Damon Lindelof be involved in a potential second season of Watchmen?
Not by the sound of thing - even though Lindelof has been given most of the credit for translating Moore's vision into a TV-ready story, he has claimed that he has no wish to be involved in the series going forward.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Lindelof said: "If I was going to do another season of Watchmen, I would need to have a really cool idea and a justification for doing it. I don’t have either of those things right now. It doesn’t mean that they won’t come at some future point.
"I just finished the show four weeks ago. My antenna is up, but it’s like only getting static. I can’t say that there will definitely not be a second season and I can’t say there definitely will be. That’s kind of where my head’s at."
That said, lengthy TV runs are nothing new to Lindelof. He stuck out all six seasons of Lost, and was the guiding hand behind The Leftovers for all three seasons of its HBO run. The network will be keen to tie down Lindelof for another run, and a second season could even be dependent on his involvement.
Who will be in the cast for a potential second season of Watchmen?
The first season introduced a handful of new characters who weren't in the original comic - chief among them Sister Knight, aka Angela Abar, the black-masked vigilante played by Regina King. Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) played Wade Tillman, known as Looking Glass.
Jeremy Irons, Jean Smart and Yahya Abdul Mateen II also portrayed three of the characters from Alan Moore's original - Adrian Veidt (aka Ozymandias), Laurie Blake (Silk Spectre) and Doctor Manhattan respectively.
Any characters who survived the first season will probably return - along with, possibly, some more faces from the comics. The series' inventive flashback structure leaves open the possibility of casting actors in both historical and present-day incarnations of the original Watchmen heroes.
