The series' 10-episode debut premiered on Friday.
The Sandman may have only premiered on Netflix last Friday, but fans are already looking to the future. It's no surprise considering that the 10-episode series is a long-awaited adaptation of Neil Gaiman's beloved comic book series that's finally arrived on the small screen after several failed attempts! And after an explosive season finale that leaves more problems than solutions, the biggest question that remains is, will there be a season 2?
Nothing's been announced, and Gaiman played coy when ET posed the question to him and Sandman co-creator Allan Heinberg. But Heinberg teased that the "groundwork" has been set in case the opportunity for another installment arises.
"We're laying the groundwork in case we are asked to make one," he said. "How about that?"
Gaiman added, "We would love there to be a season 2... Right now, I love Sandman, Allan loves Sandman [and] David Goyer loves Sandman. We know the cast loves Sandman because they've seen it. I just ran into Stephen Fry and he told me how much he loves Sandman. Now, we need to see if that applies to the rest of the world or if it's just us."
It's a sentiment that the cast agrees with! Said star-studded cast includes Tom Sturridge as Dream, the titular Sandman, alongside Fry, Kirby Howell-Baptise, Gwendoline Christie, Vivienne Acheampong, Boyd Holbrook, Charles Dance, Asim Chaudhry, David Thewlis, Joely Richardson, Mason Alexander Park, and voice work from Patton Oswalt and Mark Hamill.
"I hope everyone in the world watches season 1," Sturridge shared. "That is my hope and dream, and as far as season 2 goes, that's above our pay grade."
Fry has more specific hopes, sharing that if the series goes into season 2, he would prefer less fighting.
"I always felt my stunt abilities are, I mean, he's got a sword-stick, but that's about the only thing," the actor joked. "Of course [getting renewed] would be a delight. Who knows what they all have in mind? But what we first hope is that it builds an audience and that people really get pleasure from it, and I think they will because it's unlike anything anyone's seen before."
Gaiman echoed Fry's attitude, saying, "Obviously, I want fans to have watched those first 10 episodes and to be satisfied with all of the twists and the turns in the plot and to actually understand what they've seen in ways that they might not have seen up to that point."
"And I also want to set the scene for season 2 because in season 2, the Lucifer-Morpheus rematch is going to happen and it is going to be a stranger, darker, and much more disruptive Morpheus than anybody could possibly imagine who hasn't actually snuck out and read "Season of Mists" in the Sandman comics," he added.
"For me, the fact that people like Stephen... Stephen agreed to come on board and do this because he loves Sandman. And the fact that everywhere out there in the world, there are Sandman fans kind of allowed us to punch above our weight as a show," Gaiman shared. "We got people coming on board, we couldn't afford to pay them, but they turned up anyway because they're Sandman fans and they wanted to be part of this. We got people putting in time. I even heard recently that, which I hadn't known, that even some of the VFX people were going above and beyond on the VFX that we paid for, and they gave us something just a little bit better because they were Sandman fans and they wanted their work to be the best it possibly could be."
"[This story] hadn't been told before on television, and so many things have. People know what hospital dramas or legal dramas and things alike because they've seen them before. They've seen space operas. They've not seen Sandman, and the opportunity to actually do something completely new on television, it doesn't come along very often, and we've got to do it," Gaiman concluded. "And we got to do it for ourselves because we didn't know if anybody else was going to like it, but we knew we had to make something that we would love. And now, people are seeing the episodes, and the response is honestly actually kind of a bit overwhelming. And I feel like, 'OK, good. We made it for us, and they like it too.'"
The Sandman is streaming now on Netflix.
RELATED CONTENT
