Ben Kingsley Cast in Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Violent Cases

This year saw the highly anticipated debut of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, but the author has more adaptations on the way, with Variety confirming that Ben Kingsley has joined the feature-film adaptation of Gaiman and Dave McKean's graphic novel Violent Cases. The adaptation will be written by Mike Carey and directed by Colm McCarthy, with Carey being no stranger to the worlds of Gaiman, having previously worked on Lucifer. With how early in the development process Violent Cases is, it's currently unknown if the film will be targeting a theatrical release or if it could end up on a streaming service.

The outlet describes the story, "Violent Cases is a journey into the mind of Neil Gaiman, as a famous author recounts fragmented childhood memories and visits to an osteopath who once worked for Al Capone, weaving a dark and twisting tale about stories, our memory, violence, and the ways we can't escape our past." Kingsley has been tapped to play the osteopath.

"I'm delighted to be working with this fantastic team on Violent Cases, which for me is about the power and importance of storytelling, about how we negotiate the shadows cast by the father figures in our lives and above all about the right of our inner child to be heard," Kingsley shared of the project.

McCarthy added, "Violent Cases is a wild, hallucinatory, yet thought-provoking and emotional comic. It's so exciting to build a film from this incredible, genre-defining work."

Carey continued, "As an aspiring writer back in the late '80s reading Violent Cases was a revelation and a joy for me. Its darkness and playfulness defined a new approach to storytelling. Thirty-five years on, it's still unique, and bringing it across into a new medium feels like discovering it again for the first time. Neil Gaiman redefined serialized comics with The Sandman, but Violent Cases was his and Dave McKean's early masterpiece. It's thrilling to be introducing it to a new audience, and taking its visual lyricism into a new medium."

Stay tuned for details on Violent Cases. While a second season of Netflix's The Sandman has yet to be ordered, both Gaiman and fans are hopeful that a sophomore outing will be moving forward sooner rather than later.

Are you looking forward to the film? Let us know in the comments!