Neil Gaiman Confirms Movie Talks For Sandman, American Gods

An anonymous reader writes "Neil Gaiman has confirmed that things are finally coming together for a Sandman movie adaptation. Fresh on the release of a new issue of Sandman, the popular graphic novel that he first started back in 1988, Gaiman told CNN that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has agreed to produce the Sandman movie, and that both his knowledge and commitment 'impressed the hell out of me.' Gaiman also confirmed new progress on adapting American Gods into a TV series. 'People are being talked to, exciting things are going on,' Gaiman tells CNN, teasing that its current status is still 'wait and see.'"

Comments

Endless

[kruach aum]

I dream about the destiny of this movie, whether it will be the delerium I desire, or the death and destruction I despair it will be.

Hyperion

[fph il quozientatore]

What happened to the Hyperion movie, by the way?

Re:Hyperion

[Anonymous Coward]

The website hyperionmovie.com seems to have last been updated in October 2010, and what they had there was not super substantial in the first place. My guess? Deader than the City of Poets. More dead than God's Grove or Hebron. Makes the flippin' interiors of Labyrinth worlds after the Opus Dei look positively lively.

Seriously, I think someone took a good look at the idea of covering a Priest, Poet, Soldier, Scholar, Detective, and Consul (six major viewpoint characters) and giving them intelligible stories and arcs in even a LOTR-trilogy-length movie duration, along with a seventh plot about Ousters invading and an eigth about the second Keats cybrid, and half a plot about the journey to the Time Tombs from the ship, threw up their hands, and decided to rewrite the whole thing as a Game of Thrones-style TV season or three. I wouldn't blame them if they did - the source material resembles the sci-fi version of A Song of Ice and Fire in terms of narrative structure.

Re:Hyperion

[fph il quozientatore]

The website hyperionmovie.com seems to have last been updated in October 2010, and what they had there was not super substantial in the first place. My guess? Deader than the City of Poets. More dead than God's Grove or Hebron. Makes the flippin' interiors of Labyrinth worlds after the Opus Dei look positively lively.

The twitter account @hyperionmovie (probably managed by a marketing person) has seen the last activity on October last year, so let's still hope! Maybe it's only dead as a dead pope.

Series/Movie Reversed?

[RyanFenton]

American Gods was an interesting take on mythology, similar to Wolf Among Us, but with gods bumming around in human lives instead of Grimm tales animals.

It seems like that one would be the better one for a movie - the amusement of seeing gods depicted with human lives would could keep fresh with new and stranger gods, perhaps with some strong personalities popping in and out as they died... but none of it seems like it could keep as fresh as, well, endless dreams with a touch of the Twilight Zone. Every story would be its own universe, with a slow thread of Dream's own tale coming in a few times a season. Sort of a mix between Doctor Who and Twilight Zone, really, jumping around in time and reality to explore both humanity through strange eyes.

They could both make decent movies - it's just American Gods was put together as a single story revealing the nature of the gods being depicted in a clear arc, and Sandman was designed as an endlessly serialized exploration of timelessness and dream, with overlapping story arcs.

I'd be more than glad to see either of them explored though - it's always nice to see stories that twists the usual equations of power to produce a more interesting exploration of humanity than just who is powerful. Both these stories feature characters beyond the usual definition of power, and even morality, and use them to push the other characters into more poignant territory.

In any case, here's hoping the series get good enough writers to match the exploration that these kinds of stories demand, without slipping into the common pitfalls we've been seeing with Superman/Heroes/etc, with world-shaping levels of power. When in doubt, at least they can copy Doctor Who/Twilight Zone.

Ryan Fenton

I've got a bad feeling about this

[Harvey Manfrenjenson]

The story told in the main Sandman arc (which takes up ~75 issues and 10 trade paperbacks) is not something that you can adapt to a feature film. It's too long and complex and the pieces are too beautifully interdependent.

Part of what makes Sandman brilliant is the way in which Gaiman introduces a dozen different plots and subplots, and somehow manages to tie them together by the end. When you first read the Sandman books, many of them seem to be self-contained or episodic in nature... but by the time you've gotten to The Kindly Ones, you realize that the stories aren't self-contained at all. Almost everything in the 75 issues of Sandman (well, let's say 90% of it) is designed to set up a single, very focused story about Morpheus and the decision he must make. Everything is either required for the plot, or it's required for thematic reasons.

Just to take one example: the whole sub-plot about Hob is designed to tell us something about Dream's isolation and how he deals with it. Without that, the events of The Kindly Ones don't make quite as much sense.

There's a better solution, which is just to tell Gaiman to write some more Sandman stories for the screen. We've established that the Endless hang around for billions of years and on billions of worlds-- surely there are a few more stories to tell? It's not that much of an ask. Gaiman has decided over the years that he doesn't mind going back to the Sandman well now and then (often with good results-- I thought Endless Nights was great, for example).

Oh yeah, and Cumberbatch for Morpheus (Gaiman himself said it was a good idea). Linda Hunt for Despair.