I’ve got a weird strain of thought brewing, and I find when this feeling starts to bubble up, it’s best to just scrawl it out, and see where the idea takes me. There’s often something useful there, and besides, it won’t leave my head until I exorcise it in this fashion.

Last night, home after a night of drinks and Mexican food with friends, I found myself unable to sleep. I looked at my DVR to see what shows I had left to watch, while there was a good 10 hours worth of programming stacked there, I really didn’t feel like watching any of it.

On-demand programming has spoiled me. I notice that lately I don’t even flip through my DVD collection. And, in fact, I’ve largely stopped collecting DVDs. Instead I went to my new go-to solution: Netflix Watch Instantly.  But as I flipped through my queue, and then through comedies and recent arrivals and action/suspense films, I started to realize I was still restless – despite all of these avenues, I realized I was still missing something: a true variety of formats for a wide variety of content.

By way of explanation, let me mention a conversation I had with a co-worker last week. We were discussing the “awards season” and the films pumped out at the end of the year, and I remarked that this seemed to be the result of a growing dichotomy in the film industry – the summer blockbuster and the “awards” film. It seemed to me that film production and distribution had become increasing binary: either you pumped out a dazzling effects-laden spectacle based on a popular franchise, or you put a film out at the end of the year for award recognition, which would lead, in turn, to greater ticket sales. Any film that doesn’t fit these two categories gets unceremoniously dumped in the months between summer and winter.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I like blockbusters, and I like movies that win Academy awards. But the blockbuster, for example—as it’s become entrenched in ritual—takes on certain stereotypical features (also known as the “trusted business model”). The stories are often very streamlined, giving way to bloated set pieces upon which ornate effects sequences are laid. And film is a visual medium, so I don’t want to dismiss that. It’s something film does very well. But quite often, these summer spectacles become 3-hour films with about 90 minutes of story and 90 minutes of spectacle. And sitting down to watch, let’s say, Avatar, at midnight on Sunday just isn’t really what I want. Nor do I necessarily desire a deep psychological portrait filled with somber tension and nuanced symbolism.  Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I’m trapped between these two increasingly binary tracks.

What spurred all of this was the fact that the 1932 Carl Theodor Dreyer film Vampyr had made its way onto Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature.  I had heard of but hadn’t seen the film before, and I was curious. However, what intrigued me most last night was the fact that the film was 70-odd minutes. That was exactly the length I was looking for.

And it got me thinking: here I was with this on-demand streaming channel in which I could essentially dial-up anything, but in looking at any recent films, I was still restricted to the formats that have become doctrine.

We all know we’re on the cusp of monumental change.  DVRs have changed our viewing habits. YouTube and other Internet video channels have demonstrated our viewing flexibility and the range to the content we’re willing to consume. Server space and bandwidth are becoming cheaper and more available all the time. I remember the first time I tried to launch Netflix over my Xbox console, and it’s amazingly different today in quality, speed, and breadth of content.

What I really wanted last night? A pulpy action thriller that was sleek and spare without a single wasted moment.  I wanted a story that fit neatly into 70 minutes and was not part of a larger series. I don’t want that to be my only choice, but I wanted the choice. I wanted something that fit my mood and my attention span at 12:30am on a Monday morning.

And in this on-demand world, why can’t I get that?

Netflix has famously declared that they’re on their way to becoming primarily an online streaming company.  It’s a subscription-based distribution model. With that in place, it seems to me that CAN be offering ANY kind of format, not just what the larger studios offer up. 5-minute shorts. 60-minute action movies. 6-hour epics. Whatever. I don’t believe the audience only wants 3-hour bloated special effects vehicles. I think that running time helps you swallow the cost of a $14 movie ticket, but I don’t believe that everyone needs that same justification when dialing up their Netflix queue during an insomniac moment or on a rainy weekend afternoon. On-demand means we can have it whenever we want it. But there’s a deeper change that comes with that – it’s not just on-demand programming, it’s in-the-mood-for programming as well. And that can mean a much greater diversity in storytelling.

In fact, from a creative side, I find that incredibly liberating. When Jeremy Rogers and I set out to launch Wormwood, we thought it would probably be a smart idea to try to conform our podcast episodes to 22 minutes. Or 30 minutes. Something that fit with the established rules of television. Something that showed we could hit that mark. It took us about 2 episodes to ditch that idea. We quickly realized that this was fresh new territory, and we just needed to follow the story. We didn’t have to answer to anyone, so why pretend we could? There is no single set length for a story, or even for a chapter of a story. There’s nothing uniform in the realm of fiction and the telling of stories. And I ‘d like to think the viewer can also appreciate when something is exactly as long as it needs to be. And when they’re in-the-mood, that story will be waiting. On demand.

With my head full of these blossoming thoughts, I naturally had to tweet. Two or three times. That’s the beauty of the immediacy of the Internet. And I was happy that a few people responded. Among them was comics and storyboard artist Gabriel Hardman, who agreed, but also added the crucial component that my dream hadn’t yet considered. He wrote: “Let’s hope there some kind of economic model that could work that way.”

And that, of course, is the real work. My train of thought dropped me off in front of that mountain. And it’s not the kind of mountain that one man can climb. It’s going to involve Sherpas and icepicks and lots and lots of rope, and it may not even be my mountain to climb. But, dammit, there’s an opportunity there. And as both a creator and a content watcher, I want to see it happen.

But I want to talk about Watchmen, and how I think that – oddly enough – the film has found its perfect place in film history, exactly where it should be, twenty-odd years after it found its perfect place in comics history.

What the what–?

Let me explain:

The late 1980′s were a brilliant time for comics. I’m going to use 1986 as a benchmark, but exact publication times may be mis-ordered or slightly off in chronology. The point is this: ask anyone reading comics at the time about the year 1986 and they will light up. They will probably start to talk. Babble even. You may have to feign interest or politely ask them to shut up. Because 1986 was a boon, man.

Comics were no longer strictly newsstand periodicals for kids. There were now specialty shops dedicated to the hobby, and as a result, comics were being taken more seriously. DC Comics actually ran an ad campaign stating that “Comics aren’t just for kids anymore.” And they weren’t. Frank Miller’s Daredevil was a great hard-boiled noir dressed up in super-hero clothes. Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing added literary sophistication to muddy horror. A black-and-white independent comics scene was growing and adding nuance and depth to the medium. Frank Miller wrote and drew The Dark Knight Returns, and minds were blown. I was in high school, and I remember telling my friend BC Capps that I couldn’t ever really take Batman seriously because I didn’t understand how a guy who wore blue underwear outside of his tights could ever really be menacing to criminals. He gave me his issues of The Dark Knight Returns.

Mind = Blown.

And then comes Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Twenty-three years later, it’s still considered one of the greatest examinations of the super-hero genre ever written. It is the ultimate deconstruction of the genre. Later, Grant Morrison would say that his (excellent) Doom Patrol series was about deconstruction, but as progressive as Morrison was, Alan Moore had really already written the definitive tome on the subject. He had already done similar work with his British series Marvelman (known in the US as Miracleman), but Watchmen stands as a perfect, complete undressing of an entire sub-genre.

That was 1986 in comics.

Movies had some catching up to do.

In 1989, Tim Burton brought some of this to the screen with his version of Batman. But while the movies were starting to capture some of the style, I look back now and realize that as much as I loved 1989’s Batman, it was still gestating. It was like a still-born creature in a mad scientist’s cloning laboratory… to peer into the tanks of viscous fluid was to see a semblance of what comics were doing… a familiar shape, but–upon close inspection– we notice severe deformities. A vestigial tail. Webbed fingers.

As I type this, I have just finished watching a DVD of the film Hancock, a Will Smith super-hero film that is not based on a comic book. This is after a summer spent viewing films like Hellboy 2, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and The Dark Knight.

Hancock, I felt, had a flawed execution, but an interesting premise. A washed-up super-hero with some serious problems, meets a washed-up PR guy – and together, they try to change the world. Regardless of the execution of the rest of the film (which was pretty bad), I love this premise. It reminds me quite a bit of the type of independent black-and-white super-hero comic someone would have conceived of back in 1986.

And then it occurs to me: wow, a lot of these recent films seem to fall into that same 1986 timeline.

Batman Begins is Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, an acclaimed re-telling of Batman’s origin. The film marks the start of a more sophisticated story, driven by character. Batman Begins is a good film, but it is overshadowed by director Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which is our filmic analogue to Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and even the Spider-man and X-men films become analogues to some of the classic runs of Marvel comics in the 80’s. What is X2 if not the spiritual child of the classic Chris Claremont era of the X-men? Does our 2008 Iron Man serve as an analogue for the David Michelinie/Bob Layton Iron Man run, which included the classic “Demon in a Bottle” storyline? In considering these, keep in mind that I don’t mean to draw links to the actual content; I’m thinking more of the overall tone and sophistication of each.

While the comics-version of Hellboy didn’t appear until the early 90’s, I think it’s safe to say that the Hellboy films could easily represent the “niche” areas of 80’s independent comics, like The Elementals, Grendel, or the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic books.

And thus, it seems entirely appropriate to me that Watchmen should come along in 2009, shortly after The Dark Knight. Regardless of what you thought of the film or how it was adapted, I think it’s safe to say that it does drive home the point that “super-hero films aren’t just for kids anymore.” It’s dark and grimy and nihilistic and it deconstructs every colorful aspect of the campier super-hero films, beating you over the head with its savage message: these costumed assholes would really fuck up the real world, wouldn’t they?

So, it’s 1986 again. What do we have to look forward to?

Well, we’ve already heard rumblings from studios that super-hero films would follow the “Dark Knight” model, and be darker. Is that any different from the late 80’s when the term “grim and gritty” came into every comic reader’s parlance? Whereupon clone after clone of Miller and Moore repeatedly missed the goddamn point of those original works? Yes, I suspect we’ll see a few very bad films along those lines. In fact, we’ve already started to see them haven’t we, Punisher War Zone?

But, there could also be hope on the horizon? If we can just get films into the 90’s we could see the reconstruction of super-heroes ala Grant Morrison’s JLA or Mark Waid’s The Flash!

Of course, maybe we’re already at a point where comics and film diverge. I’ve heard that we shouldn’t expect any more R-rated super-hero films from Warner Brothers, as Watchmen hasn’t really sold as well as was hoped. So, who knows what’s next. Perhaps, just as Moore’s characters found themselves in an alternate 1985, we’ll find ourselves in the Hollywood equivalent of an alternate 1990.

Which is good, I think. At least then I know we won’t be subject to collectible variant hologram-foil-covered DVDs, right?