The Sandman
Neil Gaiman Says Michael Jackson Wanted to Star in The Sandman
In the decades before Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman was successfully adapted as a hit Netflix series, Warner Bros. had been pushing the comic book writer to make a film. In an appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Gaiman mentioned that an executive at the studio once mentioned to him that Michael Jackson wanted to star as the protagonist Dream (aka Morpheus) during the mid-’90s. According to Gaiman, he had previously come to an agreement with Warner Bros. executive Lisa Henson in the early ’90s to not make a Sandman movie because he was “just getting started on the comic” and “it would be a distraction.” In the mid-’90s, however, he took a meeting with a different exec and was told the property was one of Warner’s “crown jewels.” Not only that, Michael Jackso...
Neil Gaiman Reveals He Killed a Sandman Movie by Leaking the “Really Stupid” Script
Before Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman became a certified smash on Netflix, there were multiple efforts to adapt the comic series into a movie. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the author revealed that he squashed one of those early attempts by leaking what he dubbed “the worst script I’ve ever been sent.” The story comes from the late-’90s, after director Roger Avary (The Rules of Attraction) had been fired from a Sandman movie for wanting to use stop-motion animation for scenes taking place in The Dreaming. By 1998, William Farmer (Jonah Hex) was onboard to write a new draft of the script under the guidance of producer Jon Peters. Rumors had it that the story was being turned into something of an action movie, with massive changes to Gaiman’s original tale bungling up the magic. “I haven...
