As part of the Geeked Week event, Netflix revealed the release date for the highly-anticipated live-action adaptation of Neil Gaiman‘s The Sandman, the best comic book ever written to many of us. Netflix’s take on Gaiman’s classic looks fabulous, and the first trailer reveals the story will stick very close to the original comics. Even better is that we won’t have to wait much longer to watch The Sandman, as the series comes to Netflix this August.
The Sandman follows the adventures of Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), also known as Dream, one of the seven immortal siblings responsible for maintaining reality. As the king of the Nightmare Realms, Dream is responsible for allowing humans to keep on dreaming, not only when they close their eyes but also when they imagine a better future. Dream is also the lord of nightmares, sent to punish humans who anger Morpheus.
The first season of The Sandman will cover the story of The Sandman, Volume 1: Preludes & Nocturnes, a collection of comic book issues that follows Dream’s capture by a cult in the early 1900s and his subsequent release a century later. In his absence, the Nightmare Kingdom fell into ruins, which profoundly affected humans’ capacity for dreaming. What’s worse, after Dream got trapped, many nightmares escaped into Earth. The first season of the series will introduce Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), one of these nightmares, who becomes a serial killer once he comes to our dimension.
The show’s first season is also set to introduce other siblings of Dream, with Kirby Howell-Baptiste playing Death and Mason Alexander Park starring as Desire, a non-binary Endless who instills lust in the hearts of men and women alike. While the first trailer doesn’t show us Despair, we know Donna Preston was cast for the role, which gives us hope we’ll also see the remaining siblings: Destiny, Delirium, and Destruction.
The Sandman’s cast also includes Vivienne Acheampong, Gwendoline Christie, Charles Dance, Asim Chaudhry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, David Thewlis, Jenna Coleman, Niamh Walsh, Joely Richardson, Kyo Ra, Stephen Fry, Razane Jammal, Sandra James Young, and Patton Oswalt. The Sandman is executive produced by Gaiman, Allan Heinberg, and David S. Goyer, with Heinberg also serving as the Season 1 showrunner. The show’s first season is expected to have 11 eleven episodes, so plenty of time to deal with all the fantastic events of the first arch of Gaiman’s comic book series.
The Sandman comes to Netflix on August 5.
