Brandon Sanderson updates on Apple’s Mistborn movie, script inspiration

Prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson is underway in bringing his Cosmere universe to the big screen after striking a mega-deal with Apple TV. As he relayed on Wednesday in a new episode of his podcast Intentionally Blank, it’s not the first time Mistborn has been on the adaptation track, but it is the first time he’s overseeing it all himself. And in writing the script, he’s looking to a very specific Hollywood playbook for inspiration: the filmmaking process of writer, director, and DC Studios chief James Gunn.

While Sanderson previously reported he was about 10 percent done with his screenplay for Mistborn, his first major update sets the tone for what fans can expect from the endeavor. The project’s immediate next step is finding a producer to shepherd the adaptation through development (fans should expect an announcement in March) while he completes a first draft of the script by July. His biggest guiding principle? Start with a rock-solid script before anything else.

“The James Gunn model is: fantastic script, no reshoots,” Sanderson said. “Reshoots are really expensive. And they can mess up the continuity on your film and things like that. Because he’s a writer-director, he can be like, ‘Here’s our script.’ Everyone gets on board with it. They make that movie. If you go read the Superman script — I’ve been reading a lot of scripts lately just to beef up in preparation — it’s really close to the filmed version.”

For Mistborn, Sanderson wants to avoid costly errors by dealing with them at the script level. The stakes are high: The fate of the film is also tied into Sanderson’s larger ambitions for adapting his interconnected fantasy universe, known as the Cosmere. In clarifying his broader deal with Apple, the author said he sees himself acting as a guiding creative force similar to Kevin Feige at Marvel Studios.

Even so, throughout his conversation with author and co-host Dan Wells, Sanderson was candid about how uncertain the road to a finished film can be. Mistborn spent years bouncing through various attempts at adaptation, with small studios, independent producers, and one surprising push from Donald Mustard of Epic Games, who once hoped to turn the property into a film as part of a broader effort to expand the gaming giant into movie production. That effort ultimately never materialized.

For now, Sanderson says the focus is squarely on getting the story right for the screen — particularly the arc of Vin, the street urchin who becomes the series’ central hero. While Mistborn is often described as a fantasy heist story, Sanderson thinks previous iterations of the movie deviated too far from the emotional core of Vin’s journey.

“It’s kind of hard to condense a 500-page book to 140-page script, but what [previous screenplay adaptations] did is they just invented all new scenes to accomplish that,” he said. “I want to see if I can get the actual scenes from the book to be the cornerstones.”