Wachmen was a great book when it came out, and continues to be even on re-reading or first reading for new entrants into comics and superhero literature. Other than personal opinion, any market research done by Warner Brothers is predicated on the knowledge that the largest paid admissions group among moviegoers is 12-24 years old. Which means that virtually none of them read the original release of Wachmen, and have come to it after the fact.

Superheroes are always relevant, because they speak to the human condition, or certain sub-sets of the human experience, by way of exaggeration or hyperbole. When Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra and talked about Man and Superman, he was working toward a philosophy of man without God. That is, all those ideas we ascribe to the otherworldly aspects of religion could, in Nietzsche's view, be contained without the (super)human condition. So, in the same way that religion deals with eternal questions, superheroes are a means of addressing them in a more secular mindset. But the questions remain, and the issues superheros are faced with often deal with ultimate questions of right and wrong, what defines good and evil and the gray areas in between, and Watchmen is certainly no different. In dealing with some of the heroes as more "human" (than Superman, for instance, who is in fact an alien) Watchmen also allows for closer identification to the emotional issues coming into play. The most powerful being in the collection Doctor Manhattan, is removed from his friends, and becomes even literally more distant from humanity. This, coupled with his perspective of the universe as a whole and beginning at the subatomic level, puts him in a very god-like context. But the more powerful, so we're led to believe, the less human the characters become.
Source(s):
http://www.mpaa.org/MovieAttendanceStudy.pdf
http://eserver.org/philosophy/nietzsche-zarathustra.txt

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