Brandon Sanderson is one of fantasy’s most successful authors of all time, a prolific mega-bestseller who’s built a fandom so voracious and dedicated that they paid a record-setting $41 million on Kickstarter to launch four books he wrote in secret while still maintaining his other series. He’s written epic fantasy, superhero fiction, science fiction, YA novels, short stories, and graphic novels, with a deck-building card game and a strategy video game out, and an RPG spinoff on the way. His latest book, Wind and Truth, has been on the New York Times bestseller list since it was published in December.
So where are the Brandon Sanderson movies? With seemingly every fantasy epic ever published being optioned by Netflix, Amazon, and other streamers, where’s the TV show adapting Brandon Sanderson’s five-book (so far) Stormlight Archive series, or seven-book (and counting) Mistborn series?
In a December 2024 blog post, Sanderson breaks down the stages of film and TV development at length, and explains which of his works have been optioned and where they are in development. The project that was furthest along, a live-action movie adaption of the Mistborn books, recently fell apart due to creative differences between the producers that had signed on to the project and the studios they were pitching to.
But Sanderson says he’s also rejected a lot of the offers to adapt other works within the Cosmere, the universe of Stormlight Archive, Mistborn, and many of his other works. Why? Polygon sat down with Sanderson and asked what he’d need to make an adaptation worth his time, and what he’d want his universe to look like on the screen.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Image: Tor Books
Polygon: While reading up on the status of your many projects, I ran across a Reddit thread where fans were saying they’re glad you aren’t further along with a film or TV adaptation of your work, because they’re afraid of the time it would take out of your writing schedule. What kind of involvement would you ideally like to have in an adaptation?
Brandon Sanderson: It depends on the project. Certain ones, I would want to be way more involved in. I’ve said before that if I were going to do an adaptation of The Way of Kings, I would want to write all of Kaladin’s scenes in screenplay form for the whole season. That’d take a lot of time, so their worries are not unfounded.
I have had a lot of offers for The Stormlight Archive, people wanting to make prestige television for cable networks or streamers. Very nice offers from very great people that I would want to work with. And I’ve said no because I don’t feel it’s the right time for Stormlight Archive yet. I am in the fortunate position where I can walk away from some of the best deals that might be offered to authors, and do what I think is best for the story.
What would convince you the time was right? What signs are you looking for?
The solid answer is: I don’t know. Hopefully I will recognize it when I see it. But the reason I don’t know is, I’m not convinced that we have hit stability in the streaming market. Streaming has had a big problem with epic fantasy, and this has me worried. Rings of Power and Wheel of Time have not gone as well as I would’ve hoped. Shadow and Bone lasted only two seasons, after a very strong first season. Streaming hasn’t figured out epic fantasy yet.
Maybe this is a holdover from network television days, where they’re trying to make the episodes fit into the structure of how episodic television used to work, rather than filming an eight-hour movie and showing it in chunks. But maybe that’s a bad idea. All I know is, right now we haven’t seen really great epic fantasy film television since the early, mid seasons of Game of Thrones. Fifty million dollars per episode has not done it, so it’s not a matter of the money they’re throwing at it. The other thing we haven’t seen is any of these shows really taking off to the extent that I would like with the general public.
There is one excellent [fantasy] show: Arcane. But Arcane costs so much money, and it’s hard to reproduce that with an IP that doesn’t have League of Legends behind it. Arcane, I guess, is proof that it can happen. But I want to see what shakes out. I want to see how traditional cinema shakes out.
I would like to [adapt The Stormlight Archive through] films. Part of the reason I worry with streaming is, it’s mostly people who want to dual-screen, and epic fantasy just does not work with dual-screening. Eventually, I’ll give [adaptation] a try, but I want to learn more first. So my goal is to make some things that are not Stormlight Archive, that are not Mistborn. I’m really excited to make other things, and make them really well, and test some things out.
I saw you’re working on an animated version of Tress of the Emerald Sea, which seemed like it might be a story on a small enough scale that it could be done separately from a lot of the rest of your work. If you’re focusing on movie adaptations over what would have to be long-running TV series, are there other stories you feel are scaled at a feature-length size?
You can’t really do Way of Kings as a film series. I am confident that would be a bad idea. I think Mistborn could work as a film series, particularly if we made it in some of the ways I would like to make it, that I’m trying to talk to Hollywood about. And I think some things that would really work there, but we’ll see what happens. The streamers are not dedicated to cinema, for good reason. That’s not where their market is.
But because of that and the dual-screening, it makes me cautious [to pursue television]. I’m gun-shy about going forward, and I want to see how things stabilize and steady. Maybe we’ll have a nice epic fantasy renaissance in cinema after How to Train Your Dragon comes out in live action. I’m hopeful it will do very well, and people will be like, Yeah! Big fantasy! So who knows?
Image: Dragonsteel Publishing
Hollywood operates so much around trend cycles, and it seems like we’re dialing down on superheroes, for instance.
Do you ever worry about missing your moment, about the post-Game of Thrones fantasy-TV boom dying down and shifting into something else?
Maybe, maybe not. It’s a good question. Post Lord of the Rings-era cinema is really interesting, because Hollywood did not understand fantasy, and they picked the wrong properties to throw their weight behind. We did have a successor to Lord of the Rings: It’s called The Pirates of the Caribbean. What people were looking for was adult-oriented — not in the “adult content” sense, but mature characters and plots like Lord of the Rings had. So The Golden Compass and The Dark Is Rising and a lot of the YA properties turned out to be the wrong way to go, partially because Hollywood’s like, Well, we’ll take these and turn them into Lord of the Rings. And it didn’t match the soul of several very excellent book series, and it didn’t fit the market, because the people who wanted Lord of the Rings didn’t want a YA property.
And then basically Hollywood squandered the opportunity to have an epic fantasy wave following the success of Lord of the Rings. The closest we have is the James Cameron Avatar movies and Pirates of the Caribbean — proof that people still deeply want fantasy epics. People have always liked fantasy. I’m not so worried about missing my moment by being extra cautious. If that’s the case, then oh well. The books are still there. I am more worried about making the wrong shot in the wrong spot, and then it taking 20 more years to get another try.
Image: Michael Whelan/Tor Books
Really, what I want — it’s just a little thing, just a little thing — I just want a genius filmmaker on the level of Denis Villeneuve, someone who grew up loving my work [the way Villeneuve loved Frank Herbert’s Dune], and wants to bring it to the screen with the mix of fidelity and adaptation required to make a great epic like Dune. You do have to change things [for a screen adaptation], but this filmmaker would really understand the property, and have an artistic vision that matches the property.
For epic fantasy and science fiction, we have rarely seen that, but it happened with Dune, and it happened with Lord of the Rings. So hopefully there’s someone out there that can work with me to make Mistborn.
Leaving aside everything else — budget, adaptation concerns, directors, the platform — if you could only adapt one of your projects with a guarantee that it would come out the way you wanted, which story would you most want to see on the screen?
Infinite budget, make it my way? I would absolutely pick Stormlight, and I would do it on one of the streaming services. With an unlimited budget and unlimited creative control, I think I could make something really good. But who knows? I mean, Lord of the Rings essentially had that, and it’s not very good. It’s fine, but is it the thing that you want? I mean, I really think the key member is that visionary filmmaker. Epic fantasy has responded poorly to too much oversight from above. I think that was The Witcher’s problem. You had that visionary: It was Henry Cavill. And they didn’t want to listen to him. So, well, there you go.
