While David Goyer has been involved in roughly half of all comic book movies made since the mid-90s, it’s generally been the case that the less actual writing he does the better those movies are. This is why it’s such good news that WB has hired another writer to turn Goyer’s treatment for Sandman into a script.
According to Deadline, Jack Thorne has been chosen to flesh out Goyer’s story. You might not recognize Thorne’s name, since his IMDB is a little light, but what’s there bodes very well for what he might bring to Sandman.
Thorne is probably best known for his time on the British series Skins and for having created The Fades, a supernatural horror-y show about a teenager (played by SHIELD‘s Iain De Caestecker) whose ability to see the spirits of the dead draws him into the coming apocalypse. So, yea, he’s a good choice. In fact, when speaking to SFX about The Fades back in 2011, Thorne counted Neil Gaiman among his inspirations.
“I’m more of a fantasy novel than a comic book person, so it was more Susan Cooper and Neil Gaiman, those sorts of people. I read Alan Moore, but I haven’t read every edition of Spider-Man, so it’s much more those slightly Pagan worlds that Gaiman and Cooper inhabit that are more my kind of thing.”
I’m looking forward to what he’ll do with the project.
Now the big question left is just how involved Joseph Gordon-Levitt is. He’s definitely producing, but what beyond that?