We've remained pretty skeptical of Zack Snyder's film of the seminal comics series Watchmen, mostly because we were unconvinced he could do anything as good as the Paul Greengrass version we have in our head. But Snyder — and Warner Bros. — keeps making moves that actually seem pretty smart to us. First it was the announcement that a full-length animated version of Tales of the Black Freighter, Watchmen's dark and creepy story-within-a-story, would be made for inclusion on the Watchmen DVD. Now it's the news, reported in the Times this weekend, that Tales of the Black Freighter will be released as a stand-alone DVD the week after Watchmen the film arrives in theaters. We think this is a great idea, considering the current woes of the DVD market, and we'll totally buy the DVD (or at least add it to our Netflix queue, which we guess won't help). At this point, actually, we might be more excited about Tales of the Black Freighter than we are about Watchmen — the current cut of which is, according to Snyder, three hours long, which is a lot of time to invest in a superhero epic, no matter how epochal it is.

Warner Tries a New Tactic to Revive Its DVD Sales [NYT]