I have mixed feelings about Matthew Vaughn. I enjoyed X-Men: First Class (despite its flaws), but I wasn't too wild about his take on Stardust. It is by no means a disaster of a film, but I felt like the general tone of the movie didn't match the tone of the book. It was too innocent and sanitized compared to the book.
Gaiman's Stardust is essentially a tribute to the original fairytale. Once upon a time before Disney and even before Perrault, fairytales were not just children's entertainment. They were meant for all people, young and old, and that's why they often contained twists and turns that weren't what you'd call kid-friendly these days. Stardust is this kind of a fairytale - it's a dreamy adventure full of fantasy, but it also contains openly erotic moments, and even though the book is generally a high-spirited, there's also dark and melancholic parts in it that you would not find in a family film. That's basically the problem of the movie - it's a family film, and that's why the interesting undertones of the book have been left out of it. It's hardly erotic, the melancholic parts have been changed, and I think overall the story lost too much of its fresh appeal in transission from book to movie. It just became an okay but kind of generic and easily forgettable fantasy film. Personally, it really annoyed me how Victoria was portrayed as a shallow mean girl in the movie just because it's a Hollywood convention to have one as the third member of a love triangle. Also,the leads were horribly, horribly miscast, and so were Ricky Gervais and Robert De Niro.
Well, anyways. I'm not sure whether I'd be excited to see a Sandman movie done by Vaughn. He's competent, but if he misunderstands the world of Sandman as badly as he misunderstood Stardust, I'm not too keen on the idea.
Overall, I'm not really in desperate need of a Sandman the Movie to begin with. It's such a difficult comic to adapt because (at least to me) a part of its appeal is how the story stretched through time and space. It's not centred on Morpheus himself all the time since so many of the individual stories have someone entirely different for a main character. To me, that's what Sandman is all about - it's a spectrum of interesting stories tied loosely together my its own mythology.
Anyways. I've never really wanted a Sandman movie, even though it was the first comic book I got into. It's not like everything needs to be turned into a Hollywood movie before it can be properly appreciated. Still, I'm pretty sure this movie will be eventually made, even though the project has been caught in developement hell for so long. Right now, the superhero movie craze and well-received TV- and movie adaptations of other comics have pretty much paved the way for this project to finally take a leap forward. Also, Gaiman's American Gods is currently on its way to become an HBO series. If that project becomes a hit, Hollywood will surely be looking at Sandman again. I've heard about some of the proposed scripts for the movie, and so far they've all sounded pretty awful. I'm just hoping that it will be adapted by someone who gets where the appeal of the comics lies.
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