Movies - TV
A Legendary Pop Star Wanted To Play Morpheus In The Scrapped Sandman Movie
By WITNEY SEIBOLD
Content Warning
The following story contains discussions of sexual assault.
With the cult popularity of Neil Gaiman's comic “The Sandman,” rumors spread about a possible movie adaptation in the ‘90s, including one at Warner Bros. with director Roger Avary. In an interview, Gaiman reminisced about those failed attempts and how Warner Bros. told him that a legendary pop star wanted to play the role of Dream.
The singer turned out to be Michael Jackson, who was a comic book fan and had even contemplated buying Marvel Comics. Gaiman recalled how the then-president invited him to Warner Bros. after Jackson had phoned him with his interest in playing Morpheus, and said how "there was a lot of interest in this and they knew that it was one of the crown jewels and what did I think? And I was like, 'Ooh.'"
In the end, the Jackson version never came to fruition, and the speculation is that it may have been because of the allegations against the singer of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy, despite the case being settled in 1994. The ‘90s movie version of “The Sandman” faded into nothing, and it was only after several years of development that the current Netflix iteration was finally released in 2022.