It was just announced that Joseph Gordon Levitt has expressed keen interest in the big screen version of Neil Gaiman’s classic graphic novel Sandman. Now it is indeed confirmed he’s onboard, not just as a star but as a director as well.
As Deadline reports, this property was set up at Warner Brothers with David Goyer, screenwriter and producer behind the Dark Knight series and Man of Steel. Goyer has a deal at Warners, and he’s been setting up graphic novel properties at the studio like crazy.
Sandman is of course a much different story than Batman and Superman, and Levitt will play the main character, Morpheus. A Sandman adaptation has been in the works for quite some time, and at one point Roger Avary, who co-wrote Pulp Fiction with Tarantino, wrote a script for it. As Deadline tells us, “Warner Bros has tried for some time to get a script right, but they may have finally cracked it.”
While many expected Levitt to take over the Batman saga as Nightwing, he told Howard Stern that the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy is done, and it ends where it ends. Deadline feels Sandman “has that cool factor like Looper did,” and we’re thinking it could have a vibe like The Crow. Levitt got strong notices for his directing debut Don Jon, so it will be interesting to see what he can do with a genre film, especially one that’s darker than the usual fare.
