Neil Gaiman Says Netflix's SANDMAN Series Will Be Updated for the 21st Century
Neil Gaiman’s seminal comic book series The Sandman is getting a couple of adaptations for the fans to enjoy. There’s an audiobook format of the story coming to Audible as well as a live-action series being produced for Netflix.
During a recent interview with the Gaiman, he explained how he’s handling each of these adaptations saying that the audiobook version will remain faithful to the comic's letter, as it appeared beginning in 1989. But for the Netflix series, Gaiman says he’s updating the story for the 21st century. When talking about each of the adaptations, he said:
"One of the things that I keep banging my little drum and trying to explain to everybody that they have to tell people is this is an adaptation of the first three graphic goals. And then next thing will be Season of Mists, and we'll keep going to The Kindly Ones, and hopefully we'll keep going all the way to Sandman Overture. And by the time that we finish, it'll be 100 or 120 hours of audio drama.
"But the idea is that we tell the whole thing. But we also get to do something that I think is kind of special, which is treat it as an audiobook, because doing the Netflix TV series, we're very much looking at that as going, '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?'“
So, it sounds like things with the Netflix series are going to be different from what we know from the comic. They plan on changing a lot of things up. With Gaiman being involved with the process of that, I’m confident that he will deliver something that the fans will appreciate. If it was someone else doing it, then I think that fans would be a lot more worried. Gaiman went to on say:
"For Netflix right now, people have tried making some 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. It's on our side. And the fact that we're in a world in which we can take things that only existed in comic book art, and that can now exist in reality.
"I get these emails of production design stuff on Netflix and Sandman that I just want to show them to everybody, and I know that I can't. They're incredibly confidential, but I look at them, and I glow. The other day they sent me Lucifer's castle and the gates to Hell and all of these Hell designs, and I'm just like, 'This is amazing. Oh my gosh.' It's like watching Kelly Jones' nightmares and Sam Keith and Mike Dringenberg's nightmares just coming to life. We couldn't have done that, I think even five years ago, definitely not 10 years ago. The technology wasn't there. The budget wasn't there. The audience wasn't there. The delivery systems weren't there. The idea of going off and doing Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll's House as our first 10 episodes, nobody would've let us do that. The world wasn't ready. So, it's ready now. They caught up with us."
Allan Heinberg (Wonder Woman, The Catch, Grey's Anatomy) is writing the show and will also serve as showrunner. The Sandman comic series was originally created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, but it wasn't until Gaiman came along and gave us his version of the comic that it really exploded.
The story focuses on Morpheus, the Lord of the Dreaming, a deity who personifies dreams. Gaiman also introduced the Endless, a group of powerful brothers and sisters named Destiny, Death, Destruction, Despair, Desire, and Delirium (as well as Dream).
The Sandman audiobook will debut on Audible on July 15th. There no word yet on when the live-action series will be released.