The corporate need for a Watchmen 2 has been brewing ever since the movie trailer hit and the book sales went into the stratosphere. Our friend, Rich Johnston, was talking about the near inevitability of a sequel and how you’d be hard pressed to get anyone to believe that the issue hasn’t become a personal matter between Watchmen author Alan Moore and the management at DC Comics.

For your amusement, we present a theoretical conversation between Alan Horn (President of Warner Entertainment) and Paul Levitz (President of DC Comics)

Alan Horn: The reactions to that Watchmen trailer have been unbelievable. Is the book selling well?

Paul Levitz: Amazing sales! We’re aiming to have a million copies in print by January.

AH: That’s great. I don’t normally do this, but I think we need to be looking ahead on this one. Is there any way you can have a Watchmen 2 comic out by the time the film premieres?

PL: Gee, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.

AH: Easy money maker! That’s the same guy that wrote V for Vendetta, right? That made money for us. Didn’t he do League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, too? How’d Fox get that one, anyway? Never mind, I don’t want to talk about Fox just now. You get that guy working on Watchmen 2.

PL: Um, Alan Moore doesn’t work for us any longer. He quit in the late 80s.

AH: What happened?

PL: He wanted more merchandising money and he was mad we didn’t let Watchmen go out of print so the rights would revert to him.

AH: That wasn’t going to happen. OK, you’ll run into that with creative types, sometimes. But wasn’t he working for you a couple years ago?

PL: Sort of. We bought a company he was working for, so technically we were publishing him. But he quit again.

AH: Again? What happened this time?

PL: I didn’t like what he put in one of the comics, so I had it pulped before it shipped. And then I didn’t like a short story in another book, so he got mad and quit.

AH: Oh. So it’s a personal thing. OK. That’s business. It happens with creative types. Look, that’s not to say we can’t still reach out to him. There was still somebody at DC that he was used to dealing with, right?

PL: That would be Scott Dunbier.

AH: You’re going to have this Dunbier get Moore on the phone and talk him into a sequel. There’s a lot of money on the table, Paul.

PL: Um, Dunbier doesn’t work for us anymore.

AH: He what? Did you have him… no, I don’t want to know. There’s an easier way to do this. I’m going to call Akiva Goldsman. He’s got an Oscar and he’s written Batman. You can do whatever Marvel did with those Stephen King books to his script and make a big selling comic out of that, right?

Oh, you think it’s funny now, but it could happen…