Movies
Eric Heisserer Fired Himself From the ‘Sandman’ Adaptation
Eric Heisserer (The Thing, Lights Out, Van Helsing) conducted an AMA earlier today over on Reddit to promote the upcoming sci-fi/thriller Arrival and let slip a very interesting and quite admirable bit of information. He made it clear that he purposefully fired himself from the Sandman project, which he was attached to for a while, because he felt that it was meant to be a series and not a movie.
When asked if there’s any hope for Sandman, Heisserer replied, “I really hope so. I have been strongly advocating for it as a prestige TV series instead of a film, so I fired myself from the project because in my opinion it is built to become a series.”
The idea of adapting Neil Gaiman’s comic Sandman into a film began in the 90’s and has been attempted ever since. For a little while, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was attached as producer, director, and potential star but he left the project abruptly after it shifted from Warner Bros. to New Line Cinema. Gaiman himself commented on this sudden departure back in March.
There has been no other word on the project and its status. At this point, we’ll have to continue to believe its dead in the water until something tells us otherwise.
Barbarian director Zach Cregger is sending Austin Abrams on a nonstop survival roller coaster in Resident Evil, and a fresh image from Empire introduces just one of many monstrous encounters ahead.
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil opens in theaters and IMAX September 18 from Sony.
Austin Abrams (Weapons) stars as Bryan, a medical courier who unwittingly finds himself in a non-stop race for survival as one fateful, horrifying night collapses around him in chaos.
In the fresh image, Abrams’ character appears trapped with an infected passenger.
“The concept here is that we’re following an idiot,” Cregger tells Empire. “Not that he’s stupid, but he’s not your typical game character, with no combat skills whatsoever and completely inept at survival. Bryan is very much an everyman who happens to be burdened with this kind of sacred mission that’s going to take him into the heart of everything. It’s kind of like Frodo going into Mordor.”
Zach Cherry (“Severance”), Kali Reis (“True Detective: Night Country”), Paul Walter Hauser (“Black Bird”), and Johnno Wilson (“Twisted Metal”) round out the cast.
Cregger directs from a script he co-wrote with Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapters 3 & 4).
“It feels like one gigantic sequence,” he said of the film’s structure. “Things pop off about five minutes in, and it basically stays like that until the end. What I love about the games is that you move from set-piece to set-piece. Every location has a unique challenge. So again, I’m borrowing from the games directly in that rhythm, where you’re just running through a gauntlet.”
What’s noteworthy about this particular image, though, is that Cregger previously warned that there would be very few actual zombies in his film. Instead, expect a revolving door of T-virus mutants: “This movie doesn’t utilize zombies that much. It’s much more focused on the weird creature stuff than the zombies. There’s really only two scenes, maybe three, where there’s proper zombie stuff going on. And two of those three are in the trailer.”
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