Focus Features and Tom Hanks’s Playtone are close to closing a deal to acquire the new Neil Gaiman novel The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, Deadline reports.Joe Wright, fresh off an Oscar win for Anna Karenina, is attached to direct.The Ocean At The End of the Lane is set to be published in June by William Morrow. It’s “about about memory and magic and survival, about the power of stories and the darkness inside each of us. The narrator describes a tale that begins when he was seven and a lodger stole the family’s car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and a menace unleashed — within his family, and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defense is three women, on a ramshackle farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.”Deadline also notes that Playtone is adapting Gaiman’s American Gods as a series for HBO, and currently producing the Peter Landesman-directed feature Parkland, which will star Smallville‘s Tom Welling.They also, among a number of other projects by Gaiman currently being developed for film, list Sandman as something that’s “getting made,” so apparently there’s either someone still working on trying to adapt that series or at least somebody at Deadline believes there is. With Gaiman returning to the graphic novel series for its 20th anniversary, it probably wouldn’t be surprising to see such an announcement this year.
