Neil Gaiman Worried The Sandman Would Be His Howard the Duck

The Sandman hits Netflix later this year and it has been a long journey for Neil Gaiman to get the comic book series to screens, mainly because he had so many worries about a bad version being made. Speaking about the hurdles faced in adapting The Sandman, Gaiman compared his fears to the fate that befell Howard the Duck, a Marvel comic book character whose movie debut destroyed his reputation for decades. Although there seems to be no chance of The Sandman suffering that kind of fate, Gaiman revealed that he saw plenty of scripts that could have seen the series become his Howard. Gaiman told Total Film:

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“I didn’t have faith that we’d always get here. but I had faith that the important thing was to stop bad versions being made. Once a bad version is made, you never quite come back from that. It may sound silly, but when I was 14 or 15, my favorite comic was Howard The Duck. Steve Gerber, Gene Colan, Frank Brunner, satire, madness, glory… I was so excited when I heard George Lucas was making a movie. And then A New Breed Of Hero [the 1986 movie’s alt-title] came out. Howard The Duck became a bad joke. I never wanted that to happen to Sandman and I saw scripts that would have made that happen.”

Tom Sturridge heads up the all-star cast in The Sandman as Morpheus/Dream with Gwendoline Christie, Vivienne Acheampong, Boyd Holdbrook, Charles Dance, Asim Chaudhry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Mark Hamill and Jenna Coleman.

Related: The Sandman: Plot, Cast, and Everything Else We know

Neil Gaiman Turned Down Many Sandman Scripts Over The Last 30 Years

DC Comics

For many years, The Sandman has been one of those works that defied anyone to try and visually translate it to the big or small screen. Similar to how Lord of the Rings was viewed for almost fifty years, The Sandman is a sweeping story that takes in so many fantasy worlds and scapes that it not only had to wait of technology catching up with it, but also required a lot of attention to detail to bring out the story in a way Gaiman approved of.

Over the years, there has been a movie version discussed at Warner Bros, another attempt at a film that didn’t make it past a script that Gaiman described as “the worse script I’ve ever read”, and even a script by The Boys’ Eric Kripke, which Gaiman dismissed due to the direction it took the material. However, all of those failed attempts have ultimately led to this moment, when The Sandman is almost ready to make its debut on Netflix as a multi-million dollar series.

The Sandman may not have reached the spending heights of Stranger Things, but having reportedly spent $15 million per episode on the series, Netflix will be hoping for a big return on their investment. Whether the huge budget of the project, around $165 million across the series, will have an adverse impact on future seasons is something that will only be known once those first viewership volumes roll in after the series makes its debut on August 5.

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