MTV held a preview screening of Watchmen for some 300 viewers recently. Director Zack Snyder did a Q and A after and VH1 was there to report it. Check it out below:

“The director’s cut is three hours and 10 minutes and comes out in July,” Snyder revealed, calling his original edit “considerably more violent than this … and sexier” and explaining that if the movie does well, the director’s cut will get a theatrical release in Los Angeles and New York.

Following that, of course, will be the Watchmen DVD in the fall – which will include what he dubbed a “Crazy Ultimate Freaky Edition” boasting such time-omitted extras as Tales of the Black Freighter, Hollis Mason’s death, more Manhattan moments on Mars and dialogue-heavy scenes with the newsstand-bonding Bernies.

Collider also had a chance to interview Debbie Snyder, wife of Zack and producer of the film. Check it out below:

Collider: What is coming on the DVD? Is there a director’s cut? A separate theatrical cut?

Debbie Snyder: They’re all done because we had to finish them all at the same time. We have the 3 hour director’s cut which will be released at the first release of the DVD…which will probably be around Comic-Con of this year.

Collider: Can I ask you, is there going to be a theatrical cut and a director’s cut on the same DVD or are these separate DVDs?

Debbie: I think on one of them, I don’t know if it’s the Blu-ray, I think it does exist together. But don’t hold me to it. We also did the craziest thing ever called “The In-Movie Experience” for Blu-ray which I’ve never seen before…where Zack actually…it’s like a director’s commentary but it’s him and there are all these boxes and they’ll play the movie and he’ll point to a scene and they’ll deconstruct the scene on all these monitors behind him where you can see the green screen version of it. Or if it’s Dr. Manhattan you can see some great effects. It’s kind of like “Minority Report” as it feels very futuristic. And then there will be, I believe, in the fall the Ultimate Watchmen cut which will have the Black Freighter thread through the film which includes the ins and outs that we shot at the newsstand so that’s pretty fun. And another thing is we finished all the versions and it was an enormous amount of money because of Dr. Manhattan. Because if you think about it, it was an hour difference between the theatrical version, so it’s a lot of visual effects on Dr. Manhattan and we finished it at the same quality so we were really excited that they let us do that.

So the first version of the Watchmen DVD/Blu-ray (featuring the theatrical cut and the 3 hour 10 minute director’s cut) will hit stores in late July, with a possible theatrical release to follow,  around the time San Diego Comic Con kicks off. The second version of the DVD/Blu-ray (featuring the director’s cut of the film spliced with the Black Freighter scenes) will hit stores in the fall of 2009, date TBD.  Check out all the Black Freighter details here.

I’m definitely looking forward to these extended releases, mostly the ultimate one with Black Freighter spliced in.

Watchmen hits theaters March 6th, 2009.

What do you think of these extended and directors editions?