When Badass Digest reported last month that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David S. Goyer were teaming up to adapt Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, even the site itself seemed to hedge its bets that it would amount to anything, owing to the fact that “Sandman adaptation” and “Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a comic-book movie” are two of the Internet’s most pervasive rumors. But it turns out that all those years of standing in the Internet gallery and holding their respective sigils finally paid off: Last night, Deadline reported that Gordon-Levitt really is finalizing a deal to not only star as Morpheus, the personification of dreams and go away, Dad, but also to direct, moving from the shouting Jersey clan of his debut Don Jon to a slightly more terrifying family.
Shortly thereafter, Gordon-Levitt himself confirmed the existence of a Sandman film on Twitter, saying, “I’m incredibly honored to be working with David Goyer, Warner Bros., and [Neil Gaiman] on SANDMAN. #Prelude.” That hashtag also bears some significance: It’s quite possibly a reference to Preludes And Nocturnes, the first collected edition of the Sandman series, suggesting that Warner Bros. plans to start at the beginning of the saga, then work its way through its successive chapters and possibly even spinoffs—this in keeping with the modern dictum that all comic-book movies must spawn at least five or six movies now, or they're not even worth doing.
Or, it’s possible “Prelude” is just a winking acknowledgment that this is all just the earliest stage of development—a stage, it must be noted, Sandman has gone through time and again—with Gordon-Levitt later clarifying that he’s just “signed on as a producer on Sandman. The rest remains to be seen.” As always, the only one who knows for sure what will happen is Destiny, and even that guy is totally blind.