The L.A. Times just ran a familiar dispatch from Hollywood about projects stuck in “development hell.” This time, it’s about various Neil Gaiman projects that have struggled to reach the silver screen, and by the Times count, it’s more than 12 projects in 16 years that stalled including the movie version of Sandman, and Good Omens, which has Terry Gilliam attached.

Yet finally there’s been a break in the logjam, and three Gaiman flicks are coming out this year into next: Stardust, his adaptation of Beowulf, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and Coraline, directed by Henry Selick (Nightmare Before Christmas). Gaiman also hopes to direct Death: The High Cost of Living, himself next year with Guillermo del Toro executive producing.

Gaiman wrote his adaptations of Beowulf and Sandman with Roger Avary (Rules of Attraction and co-writer of Pulp Fiction), over ten years ago, and High Cost of Living has also been “in development” that long as well. Gaiman told Times reporter Sam Adams that in the ‘90’s, “the executives had no clue who I was. They didn’t read comics. They didn’t read fantasy or understand it. They liked movies like Beaches. But the guys who brought you the bottle of still water and stayed over at the edge of the meeting, they knew who I was.”

Today Gaiman has several factors working in his favor. The fans that hovered over on the edge of the meetings, and would ask him to sign their copies of Sandman after the big execs turned him down, are now running the studios themselves. The major studio attitude towards comics has also, obviously, changed drastically, and the world-wide success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy made fantasy a viable genre again. Not to mention the new motion capture technology Zemeckis has embraced has finally made an epic poem like Beowulf filmable.

“On the computer-animated Beowulf, the restrictions of budget simply don’t apply,” Adams writes. “Gaiman balked at writing what he assumed would be a costly underwater battle until Zemeckis told him that nothing he could write would cost more than $1 million a minute to film. Gaiman used to say that writing comics was like making a movie with an unlimited budget. Movies, it seems, are catching up."