The Book Was Better: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Neil Gaiman To Produce Sandman Movie

I love comic book movies, but it is a love like John Hinckley Jr.’s for Jodie Foster: just because a feeling borders on obsession doesn’t mean that the object of that affection will ever love you back.

It is a hard-fought love, as I am 42 years old, and therefore lived in a dark time when genre fans hoping for a movie to their tastes would have to bite the bullet and pretend to be excited about things like Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man and then find a way to convince ourselves that we were worthy of sucking breath in the morning. And if you wanted a comic book movie? Well, there was the first Batman movie that opened just after my 18th birthday, sure, but before that? Well, in the five years before Batman, the only comic book flicks that were released were The Return of The Swamp Thing, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, Supergirl, and Howard The fucking Duck. That’s a real murderer’s row of movies. In the sense that I want to line them up and shoot them.

So we comic book fans truly live in an amazing time, in the sense that there are many movies based on comic books, and most of them are pretty damn good. Sure, there’s the odd X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3 out there, but there are very few real stinkers. Sure, there are still arguments about Watchmen (which I rewatched recently and still like a lot), but that comic was so dense that it would have been well-nigh impossible to do a really killer adaptation of the thing. So while I like it, I can understand the argument that everyone involved should have left well enough alone. After all: some comics should just stay comics.

Which is one hell of a long way to go to report that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has announced via Twitter that he has signed on to produce a movie adaptation of Sandman with Neil Gaiman and David Goyer.