It is unfortunate just how badly Stardust did in the box office:

The weekend’s other significant new release, Stardust, crash-landed, conjuring an estimated $9 million at 2,540 venues. Reportedly carrying a $70 million production budget, the fantasy adventure’s presentation was more akin to the genre’s flops of the 1980s than the recent kid-oriented hits and blockbusters based on literary phenomena.

Source.

Can you blame someone?  Gaiman?  The actors?  The director?  Or… Paramount for not doing a good job marketing the movie?  Paramount likes to blame the movie:

The movie’s theme made it difficult to market in a 30-second TV spot, said Rob Moore, Paramount’s head of worldwide marketing and distribution.

“When you make an original movie, it’s always very challenging to be able to communicate to your audience what the genre is,” he said. “These movies tend to be driven by word of mouth and home entertainment.”

Moore said it is expected to do better in international markets.

Source.

It is clear that Paramount just didn’t know what to do with the movie.  I can just imagine the scene in Los Angeles: a small gaggle of 30-year-old men in Armani suits sipping lattes in front of their Land Rovers lazily thumbing through the graphic novella and eventually saying: “Fuck it, the Princess Bride did well, we can draw comparisons.”

I’m sure the movie will become a bit of a cult classic even after bombing in the theaters sort of like the Princess Bride and Fable did.  But if this is how bad Stardust - a contained storyline - did, imagine how bad an adaptation of Sandman would do in the box office.  You want to talk complicated themes?  Sandman is obscenely complicated, and that is precisely what makes it a great comic.  But that is exactly what would make it a bad movie.