‘The Sandman’ Renewed for Second Season at Netflix
After a long period of waiting, Netflix has officially greenlit a second season of The Sandman, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Vertigo/DC Comics Black Label series of the same name.
Though a recent online hoax suggested that Netflix opted to cancel The Sandman after one season due to the expensive costs needed to make it, Deadline has reached out to their sources and confirmed that this is not the case, and that the show has, in fact, been renewed for a second season. DC themselves briefly issued the following statement on Twitter before quickly deleting the post:
“The dream continues. The Sandman will return with new episodes based on multiple volumes of the Neil Gaiman graphic novel to explore even more stories of the Endless.”
The move to renew makes sense; the series showed great legs for a streaming original with 69.5 million hours in its first week, shooting up to 127.5 million hours in its second, holding with 77.2 million hours in its third week, and ending its fourth week with 53.8 million hours. The numbers on that last week are especially impressive when you consider that HBO’s House of the Dragon and Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power both arrived around that time. (All three series have the involvement of various Warner Brothers subsidiaries.) The Sandman opted to get a little creative with how it rolled out its episodes compared to usual shows. The first ten episodes of the first season, which adapt the first two volumes of the graphic novel series, arrived early into August, but two weeks later, a surprise episode adapting two anthology stories not tied to the main narrative dropped to give the series an additional boost in viewership. Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery have declined to comment.
The Sandman tells the story of the Endless, a group of seven anthropomorphized abstract concepts representing various aspects of the universe. When an occultist seeks to capture Death herself in 1916, he accidentally captures Dream, also known as Morpheus or the Sandman; after decades of captivity, he eventually escapes in the modern day and goes on a quest to regain his powers, restore the decaying realm of the Dreaming, and perhaps catch a few wayward Nightmares in the process. While the Sandman’s siblings Death, Desire, and Despair had appearances throughout the first season, the likes of Destiny, Delirium, and Destruction had yet to be seen, which hopefully the new season should remedy. Franchise creator Neil Gaiman is heavily involved with the development of the series as a writer and executive producer, with Allan Heinberg and David S. Goyer assisting him on both fronts.
The Sandman Season 1 is available to stream on Netflix. No start date for filming on Season 2 has been revealed, nor a release window. Warner Brothers Discovery is set to have a presentation tomorrow, so it may be possible that additional news on the future of the series may be revealed there.
Grant Davis is a freelance writer who has covered entertainment news for more than seven years. His articles have frequently appeared in Star Wars News Net as well as as other entertainment-related websites. As someone who grew up on Star Wars and comic book movies, he’s completely thrilled with the current era of genre entertainment.
