The Sandman creator Neil Gaiman explains why Warner Bros.’ feature film adaptation of the DC comic book series never came to fruition. Gaiman created The Sandman for DC Comics, which moved to DC’s Vertigo imprint midway through its run. The original series spanned a total of 75 issues from 1989 to 1996. This serves as the source material for Netflix’s upcoming series, The Sandman, which was developed for television by Gaiman, The Dark Knight trilogy’s David S. Goyer, and Wonder Woman‘s Allen Heinberg.
However, the first attempts to adapt The Sandman was not as a series, but as a feature film, which began back in 1991. These efforts ultimately failed and the project languished in development hell for several years. That was until 2013, when Goyer pitched a film adaptation of The Sandman to Warner Bros. and Gaiman subsequently signed on to produce with The Dark Knight Rises star Joseph Gordon-Levitt planned as the lead star and possible director. A few years later, Gordon-Levitt exited due to creative differences and the project went back to languishing in development.
During a recent interview with Jake’s Takes, Gaiman elaborated on why The Sandman movie never happened at Warner Bros. According to the creator, WB wanted to adapt the DC comics into a traditional superhero blockbuster à la Superman, Batman, The Flash, or Wonder Woman, but Gaiman and the studio soon realized the source material was simply too substantial to be adapted into a single 2-hour movie. Read what Gaiman shared below:
The problem was well you have 3,000 pages of story and trying to squeeze that into a two-hour movie meant that you wound up throwing away anything that made Sandman interesting and made it work and that made it human and you wound up with something that didn’t mean anything. So that was what happened over and over again as Sandman scripts would get written.
A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin was faced with a similar dilemma when Hollywood studios approached him with offers to adapt his fantasy series to the big screen, especially after the success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Like Gaiman, Martin knew his expansive source material could never be properly adapted into a single 2-hour movie or even an entire trilogy. Thankfully, the Game of Thrones author held out for an offer from HBO and the rest is history. Similarly, Goyer convinced WB to shift its focus to long-form television with Netflix eventually winning a bidding war for the series.
The Sandman is famously a story about stories and in order for it to be adapted into a movie, a lot of these stories would have to be cut. But what makes Dream a compelling protagonist is he’s more than just a powerful being, but the host and the personification of all dreams and stories. Audiences won’t have to wait long to experience The Sandman the way it was meant to be, as the series premieres on August 5 on Netflix.
