After the announcement that Shawn “I hate and shit upon the very concept of cinema” Levy would be directing a movie based on The Flash, many comic nerds thought we had reached rock bottom. Oh, how naïve. There’s always worse. Like Joel Schumacher directing a movie based on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
Don’t worry, it won’t happen. I am almost sure of that. This is classic “Oh Don Piano” stuff, straight from one of my favorite “Oh Don Piano” perpetrators, Robert Sanchez of IESB. Sanchez was at the junket for Number 23, the new Jim Carrey movie about what it takes to make Jim Carrey fire his agent, and he asked Schumacher (who directed the film) which comic book property he’d love to take on. The answer was “Sandman.”
Obviously the director of Batman and Robin – no matter how many decent movies he’s put out before or after – should never be allowed near a comic book movie again. This is like how sex offenders can’t go near playgrounds; it just makes sense. But it isn’t like anyone is offering the guy the movie – he just said he’d like to do it. Sanchez hasn’t put up his whole video interview yet, but I imagine that if Schumacher had said, ‘I would love to do Sandman, and I am in talks for that right now,’ Sanchez would have included that quote in his current piece (which you can read here. Robert, you left the footnote citation in the part you cut and pasted about Sandman at the end).
So let’s breathe deeply and remember that it’s still massively unlikely that anyone will ever get around to doing Sandman as a movie. And also remember that while Warner Bros seems to be making decisions like a drunken sailor confronted by a line of cheap Thai ladyboys, even they can’t be loaded enough to pick the one in the corner with the syphilis.