Why Netflix's 'The Sandman' Failed. [0:00-4:13]

1996. Following the conclusion of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics, a movie adaptation is in development. Director Roger Avery screens Jan Svankmayer's Alice as creative inspiration. Before the screening finishes, Avery is fired due to creative differences. 1998. William Farmer has completed a new screenplay of The Sandman. He has never read the comics. His script is Action Heavy and features a giant mechanical spider. Neil Gaiman leaks the script to an entertainment news website where it is publicly ridiculed. The project does not move ahead. 2013. Joseph Gordon Levitt spearheads a new adaptation as director and star. 2016. Gordon Levitt leaves the project over creative differences. Screenwriter Eric Hesserer completes the script but says The Sandman would work better as a limited TV series. 2019. Warner Bros. signs a deal with Netflix. 2022. Despite delays caused by the Covid pandemic, Netflix's The Sandman is released. Unadaptable is a word I try to avoid because you're just asking to be proven wrong. Besides, it seems like the biggest obstacle, which kept Sandman in development hell for more than 26 years, was mainly studio executives not getting it. And if you've heard Kevin Smith talk about Superman Lives, you'll know giant mechanical spiders or a particular obsession of Warner Bros. executive John Peters. Did he bring up the spider? I said he did, he brought up the spider, he'd tell you guys about the spider like every day with the fucking spider. But aside from all of that, when it comes to The Sandman, yeah, pretty unadaptable. The Sandman was part of a handful of so-called graphic novels published in the 80s and 90s, which escaped the insular world of comics to gain broader recognition as works of literature. Sandman gained notoriety by challenging what comics could do, acting as a bridge from superhero cereals to something more sophisticated, which immediately puts any adaptation at a disadvantage, because no way is it going to do the same thing. It's also not a story exactly. I mean, it is, it's the story of Sandman, aka Morpheus, aka Dream. But it's not a straightforward narrative. It's a collection of stories all related to Dream, but not necessarily related to each other. And much like a Dream, it shifts in tone, scope, genre, and art style, sometimes within the same issue. All together, it's more like a mythology, which is a difficult thing to condense without losing the nature of the thing. Not to mention, a live-action adaptation is going to need some serious dollar. We've got otherworldly settings like Hell or the Dreaming. There's inhuman characters like a talking raven or a pumpkin-headed scarecrow. Easy enough for an artist to capture on the page, but tricky to realise convincingly on screen. Nevertheless, the Netflix adaptations seemed poised to meet these challenges. Hesera was right, Sandman is better suited to television, with its episodic structure and longer overall running time, giving it the freedom to be very faithful to the comics. And big budget adaptations of famous fantasy stories and all comic books are very invoked these days. Some reports say Netflix spent up to $15 million per episode. That's Game of Thrones money. And their investment wasn't wasted, Sandman's first season topped Netflix as rankings the week it was released, and amassed close to 400 hours viewed in the first month, seeming to prove that Sandman is not so unadaptable after all. Until.