HBO’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is officially dead

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Last year, Neil Gaiman seemed confident we would see AMERICAN GODS premiere on HBO within the calendar year. Here we are at the midway point of 2014 and still nothing. And it looks like we will have to wait a hell of a lot longer as the project is now officially dead.

In an interview with Vulture, HBO head of programming Michael Lombardo was asked about GAME OF THRONES, THE LEFTOVERS, the Darren Aronofsky series MADADDAM, and where things stood with AMERICAN GODS. Here is what Lombardo said.

I think we’re all huge fans of the book, and I think the script just didn’t — we couldn’t craft the script as good as we needed it to be. I think we knew going in that it would be a challenge; every good book is a challenge to adapt it and find the level you need for it. The bar is high now for great dramas. And to find that bar — we tried. So it was a huge disappointment […] We tried three different writers, we put a lot of effort into it. Some things just don’t happen. We have to trust at the end of the day, if you don’t have a star with a great script, you’re just not going to go through with it.

Even though we love the book, we love the idea, we love the hope of what it could be, we just couldn’t get it right.

AMERICAN GODS ranks very closely to Stephen King‘s THE DARK TOWER as novels that have been demanded by fans for years and have yet to make their way to the screen, big or small. While AMERICAN GODS is more self-contained than King’s novel, it is still a complex and difficult story to get right. I just hope that after this stalling point that it doesn’t remain in development hell forever.