The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog is reporting that Warner Bros. TV is in the midst of acquiring television rights to Neil Gaman’s The Sandman, from sister company DC Entertainment, with the aim of developing it as a TV series.

They also report that WB is in talks with several writer-producers about the adaptation, including Eric Kripke, creator of the CW’s  Supernatural.

This is not the first effort to adapt the critically acclaimed series, as throughout the late 1990s, a movie adaptation of the comic was periodically planned by Warner Bros. Roger Avary was originally attached to direct the movie, after the success of Pulp Fiction, collaborating with Pirates of the Caribbean screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio in 1996 on a revision of their first script draft, which merged the Preludes and Nocturnes storyline with that of The Doll’s House. Avary intended the film to be in part visually inspired by animator Jan Švankmajer’s work. Avary was fired after disagreements over the creative direction with executive producer Jon Peters, best known for Batman and Superman Lives. It was due to their meeting on the Sandman movie project that Avary and Gaiman collaborated one year later on the script for Beowulf. The project carried on through several more writers and scripts. A later draft by William Farmer, reviewed on the Internet at Ain’t It Cool News,was met with scorn from fans. Gaiman called the last screenplay that Warner Brothers would send him “…not only the worst Sandman script I’ve ever seen, but quite easily the worst script I’ve ever read.” Gaiman also has said that his dissatisfaction with how his characters were being treated had dissuaded him from writing any more stories involving the Endless, although he has since written Endless Nights. By 2001 the project had become stranded in development hell. In a Q&A panel at Comic-Con 2007, Gaiman remarked: “I’d rather see no Sandman movie made than a bad Sandman movie. But I feel like the time for a Sandman movie is coming soon. We need someone who has the same obsession with the source material as Peter Jackson had with Lord of the Rings or Sam Raimi had with Spider-Man.”

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