Neil Gaiman's Sandman Rumored to Be Adapted for TV by Warner Bros.

TrueGentleman · 09-02-2010 07:40 AM

The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision blog has posted exclusive news that Warner Bros. TV is in the middle of negotiating the rights to Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, which its corporate sibling DC Entertainment published from 1989 to 1996. They're also talking with various writer-producers about the adaptation, with their favorite rumored to be Supernatural-creator Eric Kripke - who has declined to comment. (This would also mean that James Mangold's ongoing project to adapt it for HBO is dead in the water.)

Although Gaiman hasn't commented on this yet either, here's what he had to say about the HBO project in a Wired interview last year:

Quote:

There is talk of an HBO Sandman, because no one quite knows what to do with it. But the truth is, if anybody is going to make a Sandman movie, it will probably be a kid in film school right now to whom The Sandman was the most important thing ever. It will take the amount of commitment, dedication and madness that Peter Jackson brought to Lord of the Rings to get it on the screen.

On the other hand, with Walking Dead's precedent for adapting a comics serial as a long-form television series, this may be better news than a conventional movie version - which Gaiman mentions Warner Bros. had also explored:

Quote:

I had a meeting two-and-a-half years ago at Warner's with Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov about the status of The Sandman, because they really didn't understand the thing and directors were asking if they could make it.

So I went out to Hollywood with beautiful artwork and toys and did a presentation, talked them through the storyline. We talked about what it was and who the characters were, and how you could do it in three, four or seven movies. I got to the end, very proud of myself for encapsulating 2,000 pages of comics into a giant visual pitch, and what I got was, "Jeff and I had lunch and were talking about the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises, and we agreed that each was successful because they had a clearly defined bad guy. Does The Sandman have a clearly defined bad guy?"

I said, "No it doesn't," and they said, "Thanks for coming!" They know that even if it is one of the jewels in comics’ crown, it wasn’t designed to be a film.

Now that Watchmen, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Lord of the Rings have finally seen movie versions to various degrees of critical and commercial success, is Sandman the last great geek property of the 20th century for Hollywood to redeem from Development Hell?