Entertainment

Who watches the ‘Watchmen’ DVD?

When it was released in 2009, “Watchmen” left most critics and audiences cold. The problem with the ambitious film seemed to be, in part, down to an expectation gap. The studio, Warner Bros., and a lot of ticket buyers, thought it was just another in a long line of the superhero movies that had been glutting cineplexes for a decade.

What they didn’t seem to realize was that “Watchmen,” based on a classic 1986 comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, was intended as deconstruction, the last word on the spandex genre.

It wasn’t meant to celebrate the American superhero; it was meant to bury it.

The movie is about a group of aging costumed crime fighters who come out of retirement after someone murders one of their own. The story contained rape, mental illness, megalomania and other topics not usually associated with brightly colored superhero tales.

Now, “Watchmen” is getting another look. A recently released four-disc Blu-ray boxed set dubbed the “Collector’s Edition” contains a 215-minute cut of the film (some 53 minutes longer than the theatrical version), as well as loads of extras, including a hardback edition of the graphic novel.

“When we were making ‘Watchmen,’ I thought it was the perfect time, because comic-book culture had reached its peak, and people had the culture references they needed,” director Zack Snyder tells The Post. “But clearly, because I’m a dork, I overestimated the average Joe’s understanding of superhero mythology. I think ‘Watchmen’ is one of those movies that a lot of people went to it and went, ‘Oh, I guess it’s a superhero movie.’ ”

Snyder says the studio was never sure how to make “Watchmen” appealing to a broad, mainstream audience.

“The studio knew what they had, but they were like, ‘Ugh, people don’t want an intellectual exercise on the cultural significance of superheroes,’ ” he says. “The movie was never intended to be a straight-up superhero movie. I think that’s fairly obvious. The studio marketed it as a straight-ahead superhero movie because they didn’t know how else to do it.”

Stranger yet, the studio bosses envisioned “Watchmen” as the start of a new franchise where “there would be sequels and more adventures for these Watchmen,” Snyder says.

Anyone who’s familiar with the source material knows the idea of making a sequel to “Watchmen” would be as heretical as making one to “Casablanca.” (What’s that? They’re doing that? Crap.) Just look at the wave of negative publicity that greeted DC Comics, a subsidiary of Warner Bros., when it recently published a series of “Before Watchmen” comics, despite the loud protestations of author Moore and many in the industry who felt the work was meant to stand on its own.

Snyder says he’s in no place to condemn “Before Watchmen,” though he says creating sequels in the original “Watchmen” medium — comic books — is a “slipperly slope.”

“The truth is, I’m not gonna say, ‘Don’t do that,’ because I’m guilty of it myself,” he says. “It’s not my intent nor my desire to change the graphic novel. What I did was make a three-hour commercial for the book.”

And the “commercial” contained on the new DVD set is closer to Snyder’s original vision.

“We had a lot of discussion over the running time,” he says of the studio. “There was a lot of things they wanted me to take out. Some things I did, some things I left in. Like, they were not happy that Dr. Manhattan was naked a lot of the time. If you look at the director’s cut, there’s a lot more naked Dr. Manhattan than the theatrical version.”

Full-frontal superhero nudity aside, the public may not yet be ready for the bleak world contained in “Watchmen.”

“I’m shocked superheroes have stayed innocent for as long as they have,” Snyder says. “ ‘Iron Man’ really locked it in, and ‘The Avengers,’ too. It took a firm stand with its relationship to the morality and the stakes of the superhero genre. ‘The Dark Knight’ worked back in [a darker] direction, but nothing can withstand the juggernaut that was ‘The Avengers.’ ”