Will the recent attempt to bring Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" live-action movie adaptation to the big screen fail again?
While everything seems to be in order for the project's production, recent update regarding the movie's distribution has made fans worry about the future of the film.
Apparently, Warner Bros. has decided to drop the film and forward it to New Line Cinema instead, together with other upcoming Vertigo movie adaptations, Deadline exclusively reported.
"Warner Bros-owned DC Comics imprint Vertigo movie titles are going to come under the auspices of New Line Cinema, I'm told. Warner Bros has its hands full with Batman, Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman and all of the other tentpole pictures they are planning from DC titles, and so it would make sense for the Vertigo titles to be steered under Toby Emmerich and Richard Brener. The Vertigo titles are considered subversive compared to the WB-steered DC Comics titles with those venerable superheroes."
And while it's not yet certain what this means to the entire production of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" live-action movie adaptation, producer and director Joseph Gordon-Levitt seems to be really determined in bringing the project to success.
In his recent Reddit AMA participation, JGL openly discussed details about the project.
In the panel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt revealed that his choice is to provide a different level of narrative structure to the famous character Neil Gaiman made.
"There's tons of little brilliant moments throughout the series, and we certainly can't incorporate all of them," he explained.
"We are using a whole bunch of specifics straight from the comics, but of course, we're also having to do a certain amount of invention, and in between that, there's tons of re-appropriating, re-contextualizing, combining, consolidating, and all manner of things that literalists might not like. But what we try to be completely faithful about is the overall sentiment: that Dreams and Stories and Magic are actually all the same thing, and that they're real, and that they're powerful."
Moreover, JGL promised fans that while "Sandman" could have just been created for the small screen, it's way much better for it be seen in the big screen despite all the improved cinematic quality TV shows are providing now.
"I think a big screen adaptation is a better idea and here's why," he said of his project.
"If you did the episodic version, I think it could very well end up as a not-as-good-version of what is already brilliant in the comics. But by reworking the material into a big movie, Gaiman's brilliant characters and ideas get to take shape in a way they never have before. Also, I think Sandman deserves to look absolutely mind-blowingly awesome, just on a visual level, and as cinematic as some tv shows are becoming these days, they still can't compete with big movies visually, just because they can't afford to."
In a separate interview with MTV, Joseph Gordon-Levitt assured fans that "Sandman" live-action movie adaptation is most certainly moving forward, it's "slow" yet "steady."
"It's slow but steady," he told MTV.
"It's a really complicated adaptation because those comics, they're brilliant, but they're not written as a whole. It's not like Watchmen, which is a graphic novel that has a beginning, middle, and end. Sandman was written over the course of whatever, I forget exactly, six or seven years. One at a time. One little 20-page issue at a time. And to try to take that and make it into something that's a feature film - a movie that has a beginning, middle, and end - is complicated."
