People have been trying to turn Neil Gaiman’s Sandman into a movie or TV series for years, and last month, production was supposed to finally begin on a live-action series adaptation over at Netflix. However, the pandemic has put a pause on things and there’s no new date set for when cameras are going to roll. If you are worried that the show isn’t going to happen, you can relax. Development is well on it’s way and Neil Gaiman just talked to Comicbook.com about changes we’ll see from the source material and what we can expect from the new show. Here’s what he had to say:
Okay, it is 2020, let’s say that I was doing Sandman starting in 2020, what would we do? How would we change things? What gender would this character be? Who would this person be? What would be happening?
People have tried making movies and TV adaptations for 30 years, and actively tried making them for 25 years, and they’ve never worked. And they never worked because of all the special effects and what would be needed to do the special effects. They never worked because you were making something that was adult. People would write Sandman movie scripts, and they go, ‘But it’s an R-rated movie, and we can’t have $100 million R-rated movies.’ So, that wouldn’t happen. You needed to get to a world in which long-form storytelling is an advantage rather than a disadvantage. And the fact that we have seventy-five issues of Sandman plus — essentially, 13 full books — worth of material, is a really good thing. It’s not a drawback.”