There’s no way that one of the most celebrated and successful comics of all time wasn’t on every studio’s radar when the comic book movie boom of the late 2000s began.
Oh, there was definite interest in making a Sandman movie going back to the '90s, even. (Which was a problem for it, as it pre-dated movie producers realizing people cared about the actual comics.) There’s a fair amount of discussion/scripts out there from those early attempts to get it made. Reading one of the scripts, thank Delirium it didn’t happen.
Apparently it quickly got tied up with a producer who had not read (nor cared about) the source material. He had, however, seen (or at least heard about) “Candyman,” and he figured that a teen supernatural slasher movie was more the direction it should take. The producer insisted that Sandman, rather than being accidentally captured by a cabal of sorcerers, was instead captured by… some teenagers (using a Ouija board or some shit). His idea was that the Sandman eventually gets free and tracks down all the teenagers to murder them, one by one.
The writers of the scripts, on the other hand, were fans of the comic, so they did their best to have the rest of the story follow the comic as much as possible (which was already difficult in a 90 minute movie). The end result was… a total disaster.
So yeah, I actually am (cautiously) looking forward to this.
After the previous efforts to adapt the story, he saw, first hand, just what a mess it could be without him…
Oooh, neat! I just saw that Jenna Coleman is playing Johanna Constantine… but, interestingly, it doesn’t seem to be John Constantine’s ancestor from those stories, but a gender-flipped version of John. I’m wondering if they did that because of rights issues, or just for the fun of it. Either way, they seem to doing interesting things with the casting.
