George Gene Gustines is reporting in the New York Times that DC Comics has “printed 900,000 additional copies of the novel (Watchmen) since the (Watchmen movie) trailer began running in mid-July." Gustines quoted DC Comics President and Publisher Paul Levitz remarking on the phenomenal sales surge inspired by the Watchmen movie trailer, which is running in front of the mega-hit The Dark Knight, “As far as we can tell from our conversations with the book industry people, there has never been a trailer that did this.”
On July 24th, less than a week after The Dark Knight opened, ICv2 reported that DC had ordered an additional printing of 300,000 copies of Watchmen (see “DC Orders 300K Watchmen”). As The Dark Knight has continued to dominate the box office sales of the Watchmen graphic novel have also continued to climb causing DC to triple its already huge initial reprint order. Watchmen remains #1 in graphic novel sales in bookstores (see “BookScan’s Top 20 Graphic Novels for July”), on
The Times article also quotes Levitz as indicating that the total print run for Watchmen this year will be “more than a million copies.” Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie will premiere on March 5th, 2009, so there will be plenty of time to sell through the huge print run before the film opens more than six months from now. According to the Times, DC Comics sold 100,000 copies of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic graphic novel in 2007.
