Brandon Sanderson says studios and streamers aren’t ready to adapt his work yet

Brandon Sanderson is one of the most successful fantasy authors of all time, a prolific mega-bestseller who built a fandom so voracious and devoted that they paid a record price for it $41 million on Kickstarter to launch four books that he wrote in secret, while still maintaining his other series. He has written epic fantasy, superhero fiction, science fiction, YA novels, short stories and graphic novels, with a deck-building game and a strategy video game, and an RPG spin-off on the way. His latest book, Wind and truthhas been on the New York Times bestseller list since its publication in December.

So where are the Brandon Sanderson movies? Now that seemingly every fantasy epic ever published is being optioned by Netflix, Amazon and other streamers, where’s the TV show that’s featuring the five-book Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson (so far) or the Mistborn series featuring seven books (and counting) coming?

In a December 2024 blog post, Sanderson said describes in detail the stages of film and TV developmentand explains which of his works have been selected and where they are in development. The most advanced project, a live-action film adaptation of the Mistborn books, recently fell apart due to creative differences between the producers who signed on to the project and the studios they pitched to.

But Sanderson says he has also turned down many offers to adapt other works within the Cosmere, the Stormlight Archive universe, Mistborn, and many of his other works. Why? Polygon sat down with Sanderson and asked what he needed to make an adaptation worthwhile, and what he wanted his universe to look like on screen.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Image: Tor Books

Polygon: While reading the status of your many projects, I came across a Reddit thread where fans said they’re glad you haven’t moved forward with a film or TV adaptation of your work yet, because they’re afraid of the time it would take out of your writing schedule. What involvement would you ideally like to have in an adjustment?

Brandon Sanderson: It depends on the project. I would like to be much more involved in some of them. I’ve said before that if I were to make an adjustment of The Way of KingsI would like to write all of Kaladin’s scenes in screenplay form throughout the season. That would take a lot of time, so their concerns are not unfounded.

I’ve had a lot of offers for The Stormlight Archive, people who want to make prestige television for cable networks or streamers. Very nice offers from very nice people who I would like to work with. And I said no, because I don’t think this is the right time for Stormlight Archive yet. I’m in the fortunate position of being able to walk away from some of the best deals that can be offered to authors and do what I think is best for the story.

What would convince you that the time was right? What signs are you looking for?

The solid answer is: I don’t know. Hopefully I’ll recognize it when I see it. But the reason I don’t know is because I’m not convinced we’ve achieved stability in the streaming market. Streaming has had a major problem with epic fantasy, and that worries me. Rings of power And Wheel of Time didn’t go as well as I had hoped. Shadow and bone lasted only two seasons, after a very strong first season. Streaming hasn’t discovered epic fantasy yet.

Perhaps this is a holdover from the days of network television, where they try to make the episodes fit 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 that at this point we haven’t seen any truly great epic fantasy movie television since the beginning and middle of the season Game of Thrones. Fifty million dollars an episode didn’t work out, so it’s not a matter of the money they throw at it. The other thing we haven’t seen is 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 address that doesn’t have that League of Legends behind it. ArcaneI think this is proof that it can happen. But I want to see what comes out. I want to see how traditional cinema is shaken up.

I would like to make films (adapting The Stormlight Archive). Part of the reason I worry about streaming is that it’s mostly people who want dual-screen, and epic fantasy just doesn’t work with dual-screening. I’ll give (adaptation) a try eventually, but I want to learn more first. So my goal is to make some things that aren’t from Stormlight Archive, that aren’t from Mistborn. I’m really looking forward to making other things, and making them really well, and trying some things out.

I saw you were working on an animated version Tress of the Emerald Seawhich seemed like it would be a story small enough that it could be done separately from much of the rest of your work. If you focus on film adaptations rather than long-running TV series, do you think there are other stories that have been scaled to feature length?

You can’t really do that Way of Kings as a film series. I’m convinced that would be a bad idea. I think Mistborn could work as a film series, especially if we made it in a way that I would like to make it, which I’m trying to talk to Hollywood about. And I think some things would really work there, but we’ll see what happens. It is not without reason that the streamers are dedicated to cinema. That’s not where their market is.

But because of that and the double showing, it makes me cautious (of pursuing television). I’m afraid to move forward, and I want to see how things stabilize and stay stable. Maybe we’ll get a nice epic fantasy renaissance in theaters next How to train your dragon comes out live. I hope it will work very well, and that people will say: Yes! Great imagination! So who knows?

A stack of four Brandon Sanderson hardcover books: The Sunlit Man, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, and Tress of the Emerald Sea

Image: Dragonsteel Publishing

Hollywood operates so much around trend cycles, and it seems like we focus on superheroes, for example.

Do you ever worry about missing your moment, about the post-Game of Thrones The rise of fantasy TV is waning and transitioning into something else?

Maybe, maybe not. It’s a good question. Cinema from the post-Lord of the Rings era is really interesting because Hollywood didn’t understand fantasy and they chose the wrong properties to pull their weight behind. We did have a sequel to Lord of the Rings: The Pirates of the Caribbean. What people were looking for was aimed at adults – not in the sense of ‘adult content’, but mature characters and plots like Lord of the Rings had. So The Golden Compass And The darkness rises and many of the YA properties turned out to be going in the wrong direction, partly because Hollywood is like: We’ll take these and turn them into Lord of the Rings. And it didn’t fit the soul of several 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 Hollywood basically squandered the opportunity to ride an epic fantasy wave after the success of Lord of the Rings. The closest we come is the James Cameron Avatar films and Pirates of the Caribbean – proof that people still deeply long for fantasy epics. People have always loved fantasy. I’m not so worried about missing my moment if I’m extra careful. If that’s the case, then so be it. The books are still there. I’m more concerned about taking the wrong shot in the wrong place and having it be another twenty years before I can try again.

The cover of Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings, showing an armored man in a red cloak standing on a cliff, holding aloft a lance, aiming at a cloudy sky

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 work). Dune), and wants to bring it to the screen with the mix of fidelity and adaptation it takes to make a great epic Dune. You do have to change things (for a film adaptation), but this filmmaker would really understand the property and have an artistic vision that suits the property.

We rarely saw that in epic fantasy and science fiction, but it did happen Duneand it happened with Lord of the Rings. So hopefully there’s someone out there who can work with me to make Mistborn.

Putting everything else aside – budget, adaptation issues, directors, the platform – if you could adapt just one of your projects with the guarantee that it would come out the way you wanted, which story would you most like to see on screen? want to see?

Infinite budget, make it my way? I would absolutely choose Stormlight, and I would do it on one of the streaming services. With an unlimited budget and unlimited creative control, I think I can 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 this what you want? I mean, I really think the most important member is that visionary filmmaker. Epic fantasy has responded poorly to too much top-down oversight. I think it was The witcher‘s problem. You had that visionary: it was Henry Cavill. And they wouldn’t listen to him. So, well, there you go.