At this point, my last hope for this movie is they go crazy meta and make a comic book movie based on a comic book that deconstructed and analyzed comic books to do the same to comic book movies. That is my last hope.
There is a serious chance that they're doing this.
Consider some of the things they might have to change. For example, Tales of the Black Freighter works as a comic within a comic, but a comic within a movie? More likely a tv show or movie within a movie. I think it's more than likely that they've adapted the visual style somewhat to riff on comic book movies, and really, that's only proper. Crunch time: If they were just going to make the story straight, there wouldn't be much point in adapting it. Watchmen isn't action-heavy at all, so you wouldn't even get many cool fight scenes. If they didn't do something at least mildly clever with it there wouldn't be much point.
My big worry is that they're going to move the story to the present day. Post cold-war. You may struggle to see how that would work, but look at the film adaptation of V for Vendetta. Yeah, it lost out big time because they mangled the politics completely and therefore it ultimately made no sense*, but you have to admit they way they adapted the basic story to the modern situation was somewhat clever. I REALLY can't see how Watch-Men will work without the cold war though. However, given that Watchmen is set in an alternate universe, and that it doesn't really matter who the nuclear war is with**. The real problem, as the reception of Cloverfield has shown, is how hard it will be to make a movie which involves the destruction of New York without invoking 9/11. A complete re-tool of Watchmens plot around those events is imaginable, but hardly desirable, unless tackled with real skill.
*Watchmen will win out in this arena, as it is driven almost entirely by fairly simple, yet profound, questions of morality, rather than political theory.
** I hereby bet five quid that Russia is replaced with China, Nixon with Bush, and Redford with Gore.