Before Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman became a certified smash on Netflix, there were multiple efforts to adapt the comic series into a movie. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the author revealed that he squashed one of those early attempts by leaking what he dubbed “the worst script I’ve ever been sent.”
The story comes from the late-’90s, after director Roger Avary (The Rules of Attraction) had been fired from a Sandman movie for wanting to use stop-motion animation for scenes taking place in The Dreaming. By 1998, William Farmer (Jonah Hex) was onboard to write a new draft of the script under the guidance of producer Jon Peters. Rumors had it that the story was being turned into something of an action movie, with massive changes to Gaiman’s original tale bungling up the magic.
“I haven’t read the whole script. I’ve read as much of the script as I could take,” Gaiman told RS. “And I’m not sure if it would’ve been an action movie or quite what it would’ve been. It was a mess. It never got better than a mess. It had giant mechanical spiders in it.”
Now, that mention of “giant mechanical spiders” should spark something in cinephiles who thought they recognized the name Jon Peters. The producer had an infamous obsession with the idea that giant mechanical spiders would equal cinematic gold. He tried to shoehorn the idea into Kevin Smiths’ Superman Lives script, and after the Sandman failure, realized his weird dream in Wild Wild West.
Amazingly, that wasn’t even the worst thing about Peters and Farmer’s bastardization of Sandman. According to Gaiman, the script turned Morpheus (the Sandman himself), Lucifer, and the Corinthian into identical triplet brothers. The latter two made a bet to see if Corinthian could collect Morpheus totems — the ruby, the helm, and the bag of sand — before the Sandman himself before the stroke of midnight in 1999. If either failed, Lucifer would take over the Earth.