Goyer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and His Dark Materials (opens in new tab) writer Jack Thorne announced they were taking charge of a new attempt to take the character to movie screens. It wasn't until 2014 that the next substantial move in The Sandman saga came. Reports of development work flickered, there was an attempt by Logan's James Mangold to pitch the idea of a series to HBO (opens in new tab), but it didn't get anywhere.

Gaiman would occasionally be asked about it in interviews and took to telling journalists that he'd 'rather see no Sandman movie made than a bad Sandman movie.'

Peters clearly didn't care for it much either and the project went away, where it languished in development hell for over 15 years. He hated it so much in fact he would later tell fans at the San Diego Comic Con that it was 'not only the worst Sandman script I've ever seen, but quite easily the worst script I've ever read.' His 1998 script reimagined Morpheus as a slasher movie villain and put him in a race against the turn of the Millennium. Peters then turned to write William Farmer, who would later help adapt the ill-fated Jonah Hex. He fired Avary, and Elliot and Rossio's script went in a drawer. Weirdly, Gaiman was happy enough with this version of the script, but producer Jon Peters, a man so notorious in Hollywood that an entire book has been written about his misadventure (also, if you've seen Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza (opens in new tab), Bradley Cooper's madcap portrayal of Peters is gaining serious Oscar talk), had other ideas. Gaiman was resistant to the offer, which came from Warner Brothers, but eventually in 1996 he accepted and director Roger Avary, fresh from collaborating with Quentin Tarantino on Jackie Brown, was attached to take charge.Īvary, who would later go on to The Rules of Attraction, worked from a script from writers Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, the pair who'd later earn Disney billions with Pirates of the Caribbean. Believe it or not, the first attempt to get The Sandman from page to screen came all the way back in 1991, before Gaiman had even completed the series.

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