After taking a proverbial nap, it seems that New Line Cinema’s film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s seminal The Sandman graphic novel is waking up. The film, directed by and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, has enlisted horror writer Eric Heisserer to pen the script, Nerdist has learned.
Originally, David Goyer penned a treatment for the script, and then the filmmakers sought out the perfect writer to tackle the first film in what New Line hopes will become a trilogy of movies. (Considering there are 75 issues in the original Vertigo Comics series, alone, that’s probably a reasonable expectation.) Heisserer’s horror-centric pedigree seems well-suited to the dark fantasy and sometimes dense mythology of Gaiman’s book. The writer currently has two films in production, The Conjuring 2 and Lights Out, and was behind Final Destination 5, as well as remakes of The Thing and A Nightmare on Elm Street. In addition, Hesserer penned the script for Sicario director Denis Villeneuve’s new film The Story of Your Life, a sci-fi story that stars Amy Adams.
Describing The Sandman is often a fool’s errand — you’d be better off just reading the groundbreaking series for yourself — but here it is in a nutshell: The story follows Morpheus, a.k.a. Dream, who is the eponymous Sandman, an anthropomorphic manifestation of dreams themselves who rules a realm called The Dreaming, where he wields nearly limitless power. In the original series, Morpheus is imprisoned by occultists for nearly 70 years before finally breaking free. Once he escapes his captors, he returns to the Dreaming and begins to repair his kingdom, which is a shambles thanks to decades of neglect and chaos. In addition to characters plucked from classical mythology and fantasy, Dream must contend with his siblings, a host of powerful beings known as the Endless, which includes Destiny, Death, Delirium, Destruction, Despair, and Desire. If it sounds confusing, don’t worry — it’s a truly beautiful tale.
Little is known about the film’s plot at this time, but hopefully they’ll just follow the blueprint that Gaiman laid out.
What do you want to see from a Sandman movie? Let us know in the comments below.
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Images: DC Comics/Vertigo Comics
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