Brandon Sanderson explains why his novels haven’t been adapted for television

Brandon Sanderson is one of Fantasy’s most successful writers of all time, a prolific mega-bestseller who has 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 second series. He’s written epic fantasy, superhero fiction, science fiction, YA novels, short stories, and graphic novels, with a deck-building card game and strategy game out and an RPG spinoff on the way. His latest book, Wind and truthhas 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 picked up by Netflix, Amazon and other streamers, where is 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 television development in lengthand explains which of his works have been chosen and where they are in development. The longest-running project, a live-action film adaptation of the Mistborn books, recently fell apart due to creative differences between the producers who had signed on to the project and the studios they pitched to.

But Sanderson says he’s also turned down a lot of offers to adapt other works within Cosmere, the universe of Stormlight Archive, Mistborn and many of his other works. Why? Polygon sat down with Sanderson and asked how he went about making an adaptation worth his time and what he wanted his universe to look like on screen.

This interview has been edited for conclusion and clarity.

Polygon: While reading up on the status of your many projects, I ran across a Reddit thread where fans said they’re glad you’re no longer with a film or TV adaptation of your work because they afraid of the time it would take out of your writing schedule. What kind of engagement would you ideally like to have in an adaptation?

Brandon Sanderson: It depends on the project. Certain I would like to be far more involved in. I have said before that if I were to make an adaptation of the The road to kingsI want to script all of Kaladin’s scenes throughout the season. It would take a lot of time, so their concerns are not unfounded.

I’ve had a lot of offers for the Stormlight archive, people wanting to make prestige TV for cable networks or streamers. Very good offers from very great people that I would like to work with. And I’ve said no because I don’t feel like it’s the right time for the Stormlight Archive yet. I’m in the fortunate position of being able to walk away from some of the best deals that might be offered to writers 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 that I’m not convinced we’ve hit stability in the streaming market. Streaming has had a major problem with epic fantasy, and this has me worried. Ringing with power and Wheel of Time has not gone as well as I would have hoped. Shadow and bones lasted only two seasons, after a very strong first season. Streaming hasn’t figured out epic fantasy yet.

Perhaps this is a holdover from the days of network television, where they try 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 good epic fantasy movie TV since the early, middle seasons of Game of Thrones. 50 million dollars per Episode hasn’t, 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’d like to have with the public.

There is an excellent (fantasy) show: Arcane. But Arcane costs so much money and it’s hard to reproduce it with an IP that doesn’t have League of Legends behind it. ArcaneI suppose is proof that it can happen. But I want to see what shakes out. I want to see how traditional cinema shakes out.

I want to (adapt Stormlight Archive through) movies. Part of the reason I worry about streaming is mostly people who want to dual screen, and epic fantasy just doesn’t work with dual screen. Eventually I’ll try (customization), but I want to learn more first. So my goal is to make some things that aren’t Stormlight Archive, that aren’t Mistborn. I’m really excited about making other things and doing them really well and testing some things out.

I saw that you are working on an animated version of TRESS OF EMARALD Seawhich seemed like it could 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 film adaptations over what were supposed to be long-running TV series, are there other stories you feel scale to a feature-length size?

You can’t really do Way of Kings Like a movie series. I firmly believe that would be a bad idea. I think Mistborn could work as a movie series, especially if we did it in some of the ways that I want to do it, that I’m trying to talk to Hollywood about. And I think that some things would really work there, but we’ll see what happens. Streamers aren’t dedicated to cinema, for good reason. This is not where their market is.

But because of that and the dual screen, it makes me cautious (pursuing TV). I’m gun-shy going forward and I’ll see how things stabilize and stack up. Maybe we’ll get a nice epic fantasy renaissance in the cinema after How to train your dragon comes out in live action. I hope it will do very well and people will be like, Yes! Great imagination! So who knows?

Hollywood operates so much around trend cycles and we seem to be dialing down superheroes, for example.

Do you ever worry about missing your moment, about the postGame of Thrones Fantasy-TV Boom Dies Down and Turns into Something Else?

Maybe maybe not. That’s a good question. Post Lord of the Rings era cinema is really interesting because Hollywood didn’t understand fantasy and they chose the wrong properties to throw their weight behind. We had a sequel to The Lord of the Rings: It’s called 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 Darkness rises And many of the YA properties turned out to be the wrong way to go, in part because Hollywood’s look like We take these and turn them into Lord of the Rings. And it didn’t match the spirit 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 spread the possibility of having an epic fantasy wave after 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 wanted fantasy. I’m not too worried about missing my moment by being extra careful. If so, oh well. The books are still there. I’m more worried about making the wrong shot in the wrong place and then taking 20 years to get another shot.

Really, what I want – it’s just a little thing, just a little thing – I just want a brilliant 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 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’ve rarely seen that happen, but it did happen Duneand it happened with Lord of the Rings. So hopefully there is someone out there who can work with me to make Mistborn.

Leaving everything else aside – budget, adaptation issues, 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 like to see on screen?

Infinite budget, do 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 could do something really good. But who knows? i mean Power rings Essentially had it and it’s not very good. That’s fine, but is that the thing you want? I mean, I really think the key member is the visionary filmmaker. Epic Fantasy has reacted badly to too much oversight from above. I think it was The Witcherproblem. You had the visionary: it was Henry Cavill. And they would not listen to him. So yeah, there you go.