Even despite the fact that Neil Gaiman himself is attached to Netflix’s The Sandman in the capacity of a showrunner, a lot of fans are worried about how their favorite story is going to fare in the world of live-action. Perhaps more specifically, many fear the streaming juggernaut is going to ruin the franchise, a sentiment that speaks volumes about the kind of adaptations our industry puts out today.
But now that fewer than 24 hours separate us from the show’s debut, that concern is growing palpably unnerving. It took them a long while to get here — some three decades, in fact — but The Sandman is finally getting the small screen treatment. Why it took this long is all the reason you need to put your faith in Netflix.
At least that’s according to the man who created this universe in the first place. Gaiman recently chatted with TheWrap about the prospects of the Netflix adaptation, explaining the main reason why he repeatedly refused to do a live-action Sandman over the past three decades.
“‘What I needed above all else was a world in which you could take the first two volumes of Sandman and make them into 10 episodes of high-quality television,’ he said. ‘Mostly, people just talked about making Sandman movies where you are trying to figure out the problem of taking 3,000 pages of story and telling it in 120 minutes, which is an awful lot like trying to put the ocean into a pint glass.’”
Thank the Endless that those attempts were stopped dead in their tracks. Gaiman also revealed an awful pitch would’ve definitely ruined the story for everyone.
“There was a proposal for a network version, which was basically the Rose Walker adventures and Morpheus as a mysterious figure in the background who would show up from time to time and say things to her in her dreams. And it was like, ‘Well, let’s not do that, OK?'”
That, at the very least, implies that this Sandman is something the author is actually proud of, and we can only hope that the audience has the same reception starting tomorrow. As for that god-awful pitch… seriously, what is Hollywood thinking?
