News 'Sandman' TV Series a Go at Netflix

The Witcher trailer says 2021--I assume that this will be released in 2022, but I am hoping early 2022 if possible. Loved the summoning scene.

 

They also released posters for Dream, Death, and Desire. I was going to try to save and post them, but none of the sites I found them on will let me save them.

 

I linked to them in my previous post.

 

Neil and Tom Sturridge sat down with Entertainment Weekly to talk about the difficulty of bringing Morpheus to life on the screen. The article is a good summary of it but it's worth watching the whole 15 minutes of the interview.

Also, the article appears to confirm that the show will debut sometime this summer, finally!

Of particular note:

"I cared very much about the physicality and image of Morpheus," [Sturridge] says. "We've all seen those pictures, we know about his skeletal, muscular, otherworldly physique. Something that's very exciting about the physical aspect of things is you can solve that problem. I can make my body look like that — it requires A, B, C, and D — in a way that I can't easily get into the soul of an Endless. There was something quite satisfying about beginning with a task that was achievable, and I worked hard to create this physicality that I felt that was unusual."

In addition to his ethereal physicality, Morpheus is also verbally distinctive. His speech bubbles in the comic are black with white lettering, and the words spoken in those bubbles are a big part of what gives The Sandman its literary flavor. Both Gaiman and Sturridge worked in their own ways to translate that quality to the screen.

"Morpheus' dialogue is incredibly specific," Gaiman says. "It was probably the thing I was most obsessive about. Someone would have written a fabulous script, [showrunner] Allan Heinberg would have rewritten a fabulous script, and I would have seen it at every iteration, but there would always be a point at the end where I would still be noodling on the Morpheus dialogue: Making sure the words were right, that the rhythms were right."
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Buried in a sizzle reel of old and new footage of past and upcoming shows are two batches of new Sandman footage!!! Including our first look at Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer!



I imagine we'll finally find out when the first season will drop during Geeked Week.

 

New trailer!

...and finally, at long last, a release date: August 5!!!



And! A very cool poster:



Lastly, a cast panel:



I won't be able to watch the panel until later but I'm sure it'll be wonderful and full of non-spoiler details.

 

That looks awesome. I might need to the give the comics another go before this starts.

 

Just watched the panel. Not too much to reveal except...

...Mark Hamil is Merv Pumpkinhead! I'm so excited about that casting choice!!

Um, yeah you do!

 

That was...certainly a trailer. Its exactly what I'd expect from Netflix, in that I would literally have no idea it was Sandman if you remove the times they call the guy Morpheus/Sandman. Is funny how every adaptation of his work that Gaiman works on has terrible casting, except Good Omens. Tennant/Sheen were such perfect casting its like Gaiman just knew he'd never cast any character he wrote as well ever again, so he doesn't even try.

Can't wait until Clara comes in to save Morpheus with her Diner shaped TARDIS, though

 

You know you're the only person here who thinks they have terrible casting for this show, right? So it's only funny in the sense of laughing at your own joke. More power to you, I guess.

 

Oh, yeah, because you definitely can't find any casting complaints about Netflix's Sandman online I mean, sure, some of the people complaining are morons (Lucien's race doesn't matter, for example, although the character definitely should be a guy), but I've even seem more mild people not be big fans of a lot of the casting.

As for my joke, with Coleman I'll never not think of Clara and how much I hate the character when I see her, but she's far from the show's biggest casting problem. Its not even totally a casting problem now that I think about it, some of it is a style problem. Dream doesn't look like Dream, he's barely even pale and has regular human eyes among other things, honestly the fact that literally nobody looks like the characters is a huge issue. So nobody is identifiable visually as any of the characters (no, the guy playing Dream holding/wearing the helmet doesn't count), the show looks like it stole Zack Snyder's color filters and the overall cast is laughably bad.

The show looks bad, has a cast were literally no one fits the role they were cast in, and it looks like literally everyone involved actually hates the source material, and I'm including Neil Gaiman in that statement. Hopefully its a standard Netflix one season wonder, its looking to be the next Netflix Cowboy Bebop style bomb (although thats a bit unfair to that show, at least the live action Cowboy Bebop kind of resembled the anime visually ).

 

People here generally like things, unlike the rest of the internet which generally hates things.

 

I think the casting looks spot on. I'm not sure you could genuinely get someone who looked like Morpheus outside of someone several malnourished or someone you CGI'd to look that way. I mean some of the time Dream is a fucking cat for god's sake!

And of course how a character looks is less important than how they act and how they embody the character.

Given Fleming's description of Bond, if we're being picky then only men who look like Hoagy Carmichael should play him (reader, not one of them has looked like Hoagy Carmichael.)

 

I started Preludes & Nocturnes this morning, and having it fresh in my mind right after watching trailer, I'm pretty impressed with how close they are sticking to the comics.
While Morpheus's escape is a bit more dramatic here, the shot of him going through the portal is almost an exact recreation of that panel from the comic, and then his conversation with Luciene is, visually at least, a pretty close to what we saw in the comics.

 

Looks great! Haven't read Sandman since it originally ended, so I'm really looking forward to this.

 

Then you better get to the library and start reading!

 

I started re-reading Sandman during lockdown but got sidetracked. I'm pretty sure I re-read the first two or three so that will cover all we're getting in Season 1, right?

 

Season one covers through "The Doll House." There's also going to be a solo story but we don't know which one yet.

 

Nah, I feel like that would diminish the experience as the differences would be far more noticeable, and I don’t want to end up nitpicking either.

I’m currently on a re-read “tour” of my favorite books / comics, and have just started my long journey with the Champion Eternal, so I’ll probably wait until the Sandman tv show wraps up (hopefully not canceled)
before reading the series again.

 

That's fair. I'm giving them a reread because my memory is so terrible and I want to remember if core elements are included or not. I'm much more flexible about adaptation than I was in my younger days, so I don't think I'll be so nitpicky. Just as long as the series captures the spirit of the stories and so far it looks like it has. The fact that Neil is singing the show's praise says a lot to me.