The Sandman VFX Artist Offers Season 2 Update

Since debuting in August, The Sandman has been a constant fixture on streaming charts, suggesting it has done well for Netflix. Despite that, Netflix has been slow to renew the series. Executive Producer Neil Gaiman, who wrote the original The Sandman comics, has explained that the show's large budget remains a factor in Netflix's renewal decision. However, he believes they're "on track" for a second season. Speaking to Screen Rant, The Sandman's VFX supervisor Ian Markiewicz offered an update on The Sandman's second season. He says the show's team is still crafting the second season despite the lack of official renewal news. 

"We have a really wonderful framework for what we think season 2 looks like," he says. "Allan [Heinberg, The Sandman's showrunner] is still touching up scripts and reworking things, but we have an arc. Up until pretty recently, I think maybe even two weeks or so, Gary [Steele], our production designer, myself, and Allan meet over lunch, and we will do a script over that meeting. It's like, 'Okay, let's look at 201,' and we'll do our breakdowns together, where we do page turns on 201, and we say, 'Okay, what do we think? Where can we film this? Can we film this in a real space? If not, what do we need to build, if we need to build it? Are we building this as a physical set, or can it be a building as a virtual set or a combination thereof? Is it physical to a certain extent, and then digital beyond that?' Just trying to break each one down to be like, 'What's the most value for this, what's the most sensible way that covers the need for what we need it to be?' That process is happening now, which is great, and it's really fun and exciting to be able to sort of have season 1 and behind us to know what we feel worked there, things that we wanted to sort of finesse further, and how that impacts our approach for season 2."

Speaking to ComicBook.com in August, when Netflix surprise-released an additional episode of The Sandman, Gaiman and Heinberg discussed which The Sandman stories they're most looking forward to adapting. Gaiman was quick to answer.

"'A Midsummer Night's Dream,'" he said. "I really want to see that. Really want to see 'Ramadan' and I love the fact that one of the reasons I'm saying I want to see Ramadan is because I don't know how we would do it. Would we move back into animation for that? Would we create a whole new way of storytelling? How do you indicate that you're in a story and the story world rather than in our reality? And I think I would love, and one that I'm really excited to tell doesn't really have Dream in it all, which is a story called 'Hob's Leviathan,' which is a whole gambling-on-a tall ship-out-in-the ocean story in I think about 1905, 1890's maybe, and I would love to see that story done mostly just because I think Kingsley's Hob is one of my favorite things on screen. It was just a glorious surprise in episode six. How funny and grounded and human he manages to be while also being awful sometimes. And I would love to see that character. Just see more of it."

Heinberg added, "I vote yes to all of those. I would add 'The Parliament of Rooks' to that list, which I hope we'll be about to get to do, and 'Three Septembers in a January.' I would love to do all of those worlds, and actually, if we could somehow manage it as it's own miniseries, perhaps. But now I'm getting greedy."

The Sandman is streaming now on Netflix.