Neil Gaiman shoots down live-action Coraline movie the internet invented

Remember Coraline, the freaky 2009 stop-motion fantasy directed by Henry Selick, the guy behind The Nightmare Before Christmas? Based on a novella by Neil Gaiman, it tells the story of a young girl disenchanted with her ordinary, workaday parents who finds a hole to an alternate reality where her parents are cool and everything is fun but also everyone has buttons for eyes and it’s off and weird and her button-parents might want to lobotomize her. It’s a trippy, twisted little flick well worth a revisit:

Fast-forward 10 years. Disney is remaking all of its animated classics as live-action blockbusters, some of which are received better than others. Suddenly, everyone is wondering about what other animated films could be given the live-action treatment, and somehow or another, Coraline came up:

Then, as is the way of things on the internet, once people started speculating about the possibility of a live-action Coraline, the backlash to the possibility began:

If you were coming into the discussion at this point in the internet outrage cycle, it might have been easy to miss that the speculation and the backlash to the speculation all happened without an actual live-action Coraline movie ever being on the table in any meaningful way. So it goes sometimes online, where rumor is truth and truth rumor. It got to the point where Gaiman himself stepped in and told all these kids to get off his digital lawn:

So there you have it: the internet speculated about a movie that didn’t exist, the discussion got away from them to the point where the uninitiated thought they were talking about a movie that did exist, and the writer of the story on which the original movie was based confirmed that the new movie did not, in fact, exist. It’s the circle of life, as the opening to a live-action remake of an animated movie currently in theaters might put it.

So no harm done, bit it is yet another fascinating example of comments on the internet taking on a life of their own. Robot dominion, here we come.

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h/t The A.V. Club