I have heard and read several interviews with the director, as well as interviews with people who have seen excerpts from the film. I have also seen almost all the clips out there, except for the stuff that was screened at Comic-Con. Here is a summary of the information I gleaned.

Another long list of spoilers that show differences in the movie versus the comic can be found here: http://www.mahalo.com/Watchmen_Spoilers That list is different than mine.

If you have not red the comic and do not want to be spoiled, get the heck out of here. You have been warned.

Are you sure you want to read spoilers? There are a bunch, right here coming up.

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1. There will be no Squid at the end. In fact, from what I gather, the entire subplot of the artists and writers going missing has been removed and simplified in lieu of giving more screen time to the main characters. However, the director states that the emotional tone and impact of the ending from the graphic novel has not been changed. That is, an artificial catastrophe, engineered by Veidt, occurs that forces the two sides to come together to avert nuclear war.

2. Dan Drieberg will not be quite as impotent a character, literally. His first, um time, with Laurie will reportedly go better.

3. Tales of the Black Freighter, the pirate comic that is interspersed through the graphic novel, will not be a part of the cinema release. It will come out as a separate story, direct to DVD, shortly after the movie is released in theaters. The DVD release of Watchmen will reportedly have a director's cut available where "Freighter" can be interspersed like it is in the comic.

4. More Nixon. From what I've seen of the footage and previews myself, Nixon is in it a lot more than in the comic. Nixon gets mentioned a lot, but only really has one short scene. I have also heard in interviews that this is the case.

5. The action will be more "actiony" and more "superheroey." You can see this pretty clearly from the trailers. In the graphic novel, the action didn't tend to be the typical "superheroes kick butt" action, it was largely superhero has-beens trying to remember how to do this crimefighting thing. The cool fighting was there somewhat in the novel, but will be "turned up to eleven" in the movie. I've heard someone describe it as "fight porn." Personally I'm fine with that because it's a movie and the subtlety there does not work as well on screen. I think that the essences of the characters will be right.

5. Less Dr. Manhattan nudity than in the comic, for obvious reasons. BUt I hear there will still be some big blue, uh, super nudity.

6. The additional source materials that were in the comic, like Hollis Mason's book excerpt, classified documents about Dr. Manhattan, ad proofs from Veidt's desk, obviously cannot go very easily into the movie. However, the creators are taking all this "historical" material and using it to put together a viral marketing campaign for the movie.

They are putting all those types of things - audio, video, "old" magazine articles, etc, on the site, http://www.thenewfrontiersman.net/ it's a lot of fun, extremely well-done, and worth a look.

To answer the second part of your question, that's hard to say. IMHO, a movie can never be better than its source material, only as good as, or worse. I think Watchmen will be pretty close to the quality of the graphic novel, but not quite as good, for a few reasons.

There's not enough time to go into back story like in the graphic novel. In the novel you can go back and re-read something if it doesn't make sense. In a movie, more must be spelled out. In the graphic novel there was an insanely detailed amount of artwork things going on that the movie can only hope to recapture a few of them. The story in the movie, as I've said, has already been simplified, and glammed up for a general movie going audience.

That being said, I still think that Watchmen is going to be a fantastic movie, and one of the best comic book movies ever, if not the best. I see it as being the Lord of the Rings of comic book movies. I think LOTR were as good as the books, better in some ways, worse in others.

The only other movie I've seen that was just as good as the book was The Shawshank Redemption. I just read the novella that movie was based off of, and it was so very close to the book that I was stunned. The small changes they did make were largely due to the format of a movie, where the author had explained things in the book, they did not need to be explained in the movie. The changes made worked better for a movie format. Other than that, exactly the same, with even much of the narrative and dialogue from the novel lifted into the movie word-for-word.

p.s. can you tell I'm excited for Watchmen?
Source(s):
http://www.thenewfrontiersman.net/

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=69AB51B373BB529D

http://www.mahalo.com/Watchmen_Spoilers

http://www.youtube.com/user/Blunty3000

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"The world will look up and shout, 'Save us!' And I will whisper...'No.'"

I think this film will be a good depiction of the world represented in the watchmen graphic novel. My primary reasoning is the talent of the director Zack Snyder the innovator who gave you such movies as... Playground (1990), Dawn of the dead (2004), and the visually dynamic 300 (2006). It should be interesting to see what he does with his remake of the cult classic Heavy Metal (2010). Snyder's body of work has earned him a number of awards, including two Clio Awards and a Gold Lion Award.

Overall as you can see here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4blSrZvPhU

I think the film will be well received and I will even foresee possible academy awards for this production. In fact I would be surprised if it was not nominated for more then one.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zack_Snyder#Filmography
Experience in independent film and an understanding of the body of work created by the director.

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A giant squid does not destroy Manhattan at the end of the movie.
Source(s):
From the mouth of Zack Snyder. I heard him give a talk at the Apple Store in Santa Monica a couple weeks ago.

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