Having finally dragged Good Omens from development purgatory himself, Neil Gaiman has said that his days as a direct TV showrunner are behind him. Yet he continues to have involvement in bringing his novel and comicbook work to the screen, and possibly his most famous is now part of a pricey, exciting deal. Netflix has picked up the rights to produce a Sandman TV series.
Gaiman will be an executive producer alongside David Goyer, though the actual work of running the eventual show is currently the responsibility of Allan Heinberg (who wrote the credited Wonder Woman cinema script and has worked on show such as Scandal and The Catch).
Sandman, for those who might be unfamiliar, was a 75-issue DC/Vertigo comics series published in the 1990s. Gaiman's own one-line synopsis was: "The lord of dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision," but there's obviously a lot more to it than that, with the sprawling series taking in pantheons and mythologies from across the globe, via threads about fantastical quests, serial killers, road trips, and short stories only tangentially connected to the core narrative. Many tales featured Dream's siblings, the Endless: Destiny, Death, Destruction, Despair, Desire and Delirium.
A screen version has been in limbo for decades, most recently in the form of a movie that had Joseph Gordon-Levitt attached to star and direct before creative differences scuttled it. And before that, there was proposed television series to be overseen by Supernatural's Eric Kripke.
Warner Bros. TV had the rights to the characters and stories, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, it is choosing to licence them to Netflix for a huge chunk of change rather than producing the show in-house and putting it on its own upcoming streaming service.
The deal is apparently close, but hasn't closed quite yet, but expect this one to be a big deal in more ways than one. Plus, the hefty budgets and looser restrictions of a streaming show will be helpful to such a complex tale.