Coraline Director Has Disappointing Update on Planned Neil Gaiman Adaptation

Just two months after news broke that Coraline filmmaker Henry Selick was planning to adapt Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the filmmaker now says it looks like that movie is in a pretty uncertain state. At the time, Selick had said he hoped to make it his next film if he could find studio backing, but it’s possible that with a number of abuse allegations recently made against Gaiman, any efforts to find backing for the project have been stymied. Back in June, Selick said he was shopping a 35-page treatment and plenty of concept art around to studios. 

Without giving details about any particular deals, the Nightmare Before Christmas director suggested that ShadowMachine (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio) and Coraline studio Laika were two obvious frontrunners. In a new interview, he told GamesRadar+ that things were not looking promising.

“It’s something I love and have danced around,” Selick said. “It’s almost come together a few times. I would hope that it might still come together, but I have no predictions.”

According to a recent report, Selick also has plans to revive The Shadow King, a movie he was in and out of development with for years. While he has a few minutes of finalized footage from the time he was developing it with Pixar, his current plan is apparently to develop it as a graphic novel, in the hopes that he can then sell it as an adaptation.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane was originally released in 2013. It centers on a man who returns to his hometown for the first time in years, to attend a funeral. While there, he reflects on his childhood and on the fantastical stories of a local girl who insisted the pond behind her house was an ocean. The trip back home brings a flood of forgotten or repressed memories.

Selick further said that he considers the movie “almost a sequel” to Coraline, and that he believes The Ocean at the End of the Lane to be some of Gaiman’s best writing.

“Instead of a child going to this other world with a monstrous mother, it’s a monstrous mother who comes into our world to wreak havoc on a kid’s life,” Selick told Variety by way of comparison.

Gaiman currently has Dead Boy Detectives and The Sandman, both adaptations of Vertigo comics he wrote, going at Netflix while Good Omens, adapting a book Gaiman co-wrote with Terry Pratchett, streams on Prime Video.