Warner Bros. aims to make sure the Watchmen are unavoidable

Fanboys are a given, but what about the kids, book club members and Nip/Tuck viewers?
  After the massive $1 billion success it had with The Dark Knight, Warner Bros. is looking for an audience beyond genre geeks with ads and swag for Watchmen, the upcoming release based on the Alan Moore graphic novel. A two-and-a-half minute ad running on cable has director Zack Snyder talking up the source material for those who aren't familiar but realize cultural import when they hear about it. "It's on Time magazine's list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th Century," Snyder tells us and was "instantly viewed as a classic or as a work of literature that was beyond its own genre." Gravitas is good.
  On the other end of the spectrum, this week's New York Toy Fair unveiled prototypes of Watchmen products, "The End is Nigh" baseball caps, Dr. Manhattan lunchboxes, Rorschach ski masks, that are likely to cause the fervently iconoclastic, anti-consumerist Moore to have an aneurism. (He's already said he won't see the flick). Loyalists are no  doubt sharpening their claws for the inevitable blog attack on the tchotchkes.
  That's not stopping Warner from  going full force. If the movie can just live up to its hype, all these machinations could be quickly forgotten. But the coasters, doomsday clocks and cigarette cases? That may take some time.

—Posted by T.L. Stanley