Was Doomsday clock that shitty sequel to the Watchmen that Alan Moore hated?
And Dave Gibbons wasn't pleased about it either.
Doomsday Clock isn't bad, it's more it got overshadowed by the HBO show releasing around the same time and got screwed over by delays. It's more a story about Ozymandias' plan not working out in the long term so he constructs an elaborate plan to try to get Dr. Manhattan back and rediscover his humanity. It also tries to parallel the cold war stuff from the original to modern media disinformation campaigns by various interest groups.
I think it's actually the better of the two though Watchmen didn't really need a sequel. People's brains just turn off when they see Batman and Superman on the covers since they assumed it was a soulless cashgrab when you can pull them out and the story still works on the Watchmen side. The DCU's mostly there for contrast to Watchmen's more "realistic" universe.
Doomsday Clock was supposed to be the culmination to what had been building up to since DC Rebirth started in 2016, but the aforementioned delays and Dan DiDio's antipathy for Geoff Johns drove it off the rails. Its biggest revelation was the introduction of the "metaverse" concept where Superman actually first appeared in 1938, the metaverse kept pushing Superman's timeline forward and spun off the original timeline into a parallel universe. For example, the birth of the Speed Force in 1956 pushed Superman's debut and created Earth-Two (the pre-Crisis home of the Justice Society.) Similarly,
Crisis on Infinite Earths spun Earth-One off into Earth-1985 so the Silver/Bronze Age versions of the Justice League are at least theoretically still out there having their own adventures as is the New 52 on (surprise) Earth-52. Doctor Manhattan discovered the metaverse and decided to perform an experiment by exploiting
Flashpoint to shame the DC multiverse as he saw fit. As such he made small alterations like moving Alan Scott's lantern six inches so he wasn't able to reach after the train "accident" and died of his injuries. Manhattan was likewise responsible for Jonathan and Martha Kent's deaths.
Another important thread is the murder of Carver Coleman, a closeted gay man in 1940s-50s Hollywood whose mother was blackmailing him. Johns uses his last film, The Adjournment as a narrative framing device similar to how Moore used the Black Freighter as one in
Watchmen. As for the DCU being there for contrast, Superman and Dr. Manhattan are actually contrasts of each other. Superman being an extraterrestrial born with his powers whose upbringing by the Kents instilled him with his humanity while Manhattan was born human, but lost his humanity when he gained his god-like powers. Manhattan was convinced that Superman was either going to kill him or he was going to destroy all of existence because he could no longer see the future as he once had, but regained a part of humanity when Superman chose a third option.
There is a bit I'm glossing over, but I think
Doomsday Clock was structurally solid and an engaging read. One of my minor quibbles is that is made Martin Stein (AKA the other half of Firestorm) a villain who manipulated events so that he could fuse with Ronnie Raymond and infiltrate the Justice League. He wasn't a complete monster has he was motivated by the loss of his own (never mentioned until then) son, and seemed to have genuine affection for Ronnie because of their supposed similarities.
That said, Bob likely never read
Doomsday Clock apart from what he read off of Wikipedia where he gets all of his comic book info from. Even partially adapting the story would mean stripping away most of its core elements and requires much planning from a narrative standpoint. Something WB is remarkably poor at with the DCEU as are of their decision making has been reactionary since
BvS underperformed.
