Getting a movie adaptation of their books isn’t just a perennial dream of writers. Spend any length of time in online reader circles, and you’ll soon hear multiple fans asking when they can expect to see their favorite books by their top authors on the silver screen.
As most of those authors have pointed out—much to readers’ chagrin—they have precious little say regarding when or even if Hollywood will adapt their work. Standard publishing contracts have long accounted for every right associated with a given book, and movie rights are often viewed as the sweetest plum. So the second an author signs over the rights to a book, primary decision making authority for exercising those rights goes to the publisher.
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The takeaway is that in a the vast majority of cases, a book’s author lacks the muscle to get a movie made on demand. Not even epic fantasy king Brandon Sanderson is exempt from that rule.
Author Brandon Sanderson is one of the biggest writers in the sci-fi/fantasy genre today, but the movie adaptation of his Mistborn series has seemingly stalled. Beginning with the release of 2006’s The Final Empire, Sanderson’s Mistborn Saga concerns a band of Allomancers, people who can burn metals, as they use their powers to overthrow an evil Empire that has ruled for thousands of years. Like the best fantasy scribes before him, Sanderson packed his Cosmere universe with copious details that make the stories feel more real, engaging, and fleshed out.
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In what is perhaps the most disheartening news for fans who have been following the movie’s development for years, author and current screenwriter Brandon Sanderson has revealed that development on the Mistborn movie script is stalled (via Winter Is Coming). In his yearly “State of the Sanderson” address in December 2023, the prolific fantasy writer revealed that “The Mistborn film has been in development but has run into some hiccups and is on pause for now.”
How long that pause will last is unknown, and it doesn’t bode well for the project that has languished in development hell for years on end. The reason for the delay is rather vague, but Sanderson did mention he has “basically put everything else on hold, despite interest, as I decide on a strategy.” Mistborn is still a big priority, even as his adventures in video games, and his ever-expanding literary endeavors, roll on.
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Brandon Sanderson’s latest update on the development of the Mistborn script is anything but hopeful, but it is hardly the first time the project has hit a snag. Sanderson first optioned the Mistborn books in 2010, but the property changed hands in 2016 when DMG Entertainment got ahold of Sanderson’s entire Cosmere universe (via Variety). In an attempt to adapt the first novel, The Final Empire, DMG initially hired F. Scott Frazier to pen the screenplay, but those plans fell through.
The series is still presumably still optioned by DMG, but news has ground to a halt as development stagnated across the last few years of the 2010s and the early part of the 2020s. Brandon Sanderson himself was brought on to write the screenplay after Frazier’s departure, but little has come in the nearly half a decade since the author was tapped.
Related: Neopatron Brandon
With Hollywood’s financial woes continuing unabated, one would think that adapting a popular series of books with a massive audience by the all-time Kickstarter king would be obvious.
When not even King Brandon can get a movie made, it would seem that Hollywood has lost the plot.
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This is where I think animation could step in a fill that need. How bad do you want to see your book adapted for film? There are plenty of hungry animators out there who could do the job and agree to terms that you (the author) would have creative control over what goes on.
With animation, all you need is a studio, artists, and the equipment to get the job done. You don’t have to deal with snobby actors, inept directors, and dumb writers. Above all else, there’s no gatekeeping involved.
Plus with Brandon’s fantastical worlds, animation has no limits – if you can draw it, it’s possible.
As you’ve pointed out in the past, when reminding folks why ‘get woke, go broke’ is a cope, profit isn’t a driving motive anymore. They’d rather go broke and stay that way than lose control.
If there’s a hidden mercy here, perhaps it’s that Sanderson’s work can’t get caught in the IP Death Cycle if Hollywood passes on a movie adaption. He can fund lots of other things with his own Kickstarter surplus, so he could fund the movie he wants made the way he wants it made.
At some point the whole structure does collapse without the money that comes with paying customers. Then like the newspapers, corporate music, and the publishing industry itself, they gain the patronage of wealthy men who like the idea of influence.
There are plenty of independent filmmakers he could try for other projects. I would recommend using the books from his Kickstarter project and crowdfunding an adaption of that one away from the Hollywood machine, too. Not only would it be better than whatever adaption Hollywood would eventually vomit out, it would prove there is still interest in the media of film outside CG slop and tired post-1990s PC morality garbage.
He could successfully prove two entire industries are woefully irrelevant and broken in one quick swoop. Even more if he could get a video game adaption going by a smaller studio. He has the opportunity to do quite a lot here, and he stands to make a lot from doing so.
Your comment makes perfect sense, especially in light of the fact that college kids with rented RED cams have been showing up Hollywood for a decade now. My trained actor buddy Wes alludes to it in the Generation Video episode we featured last Friday.
https://brianniemeier.com/2024/04/generation-video-grand-opening/
I would look at something like the recent Japanese Godzilla as a template. Done for a fraction of the budget of Hollywood blockbusters and looks polished with decent CGI etc. Given Brandon’s clout I’m sure he could get a team together to find the people to do it ‘in-house’ so to speak. Or make a mini-series. Sell it to one of Satan’s little helpers (Netflix, Apple) or find a way to get it out (make an app or look at Angel Studios & The Chosen for ideas). He’s a creative man. So be creative.
Sanderson is getting into video games?
Here’s a longer version of that quote from his “State of the Sanderson” post:
“The Mistborn film has been in development but has run into some hiccups and is on pause for now, but I hope to have more news to share in 2024. But really, there’s not much else to report. Snapshot (the novella) is still being tinkered with at Universal. It might be the only thing under option right now, because I basically put everything else on hold, despite interest, as I decide on a strategy.
Tress would make a pretty great animated feature though, don’t you think?”
The most interesting part is that other than a Universal adaptation of “Snapshot”, he has put other film projects on hold, “despite interest”. That implies that there are studios interested in adapting some of his other works, but he isn’t moving forward with negotiations to make it happen.
He doesn’t say what the “hiccups” holding up a Mistborn movie are. It could be a lack of interest on the studio’s part, or it could be some sort of negotiations breakdown (maybe he wanted more creative control over the project than the studio was willing to give, for instance).
“With Hollywood’s financial woes continuing unabated, one would think that adapting a popular series of books with a massive audience by the all-time Kickstarter king would be obvious.”
It might not be so obvious in Hollywood. I imagine that most studio executives would look at Mistborn and say “Never heard of it, and it looks expensive to make. For that kind of money, we could make a sure bet like ‘Spider-Man 27’ or ‘Ghostbusters 15′”.
I think that if Sanderson would find a proven crew of talented independent filmmakers, he would probably be able to produce and crowdfund movie adaptations of some of his books (probably not Mistborn, though, due to rights issues and the amount of budget required). Or maybe he could even write a new story specifically for the screen and crowdfund it. He could maybe even get a few fairly well-known actors to join in. Tim Blake Nelson is willing to work on indie projects, for instance.
I’ve thought for years that Mistborn should be adapted as an anime, or otherwise animated. Can you imagine what Genndy Tartakovsky could do with this if he got his hands on it? If anybody could make this work, it’s him.
Given the length of these books, trying to condense it all into a movie isn’t a great idea anyway. If you adapted each book as a season of an animated series, that could do it justice. It’s hard to imagine a film adaptation of pretty much any longer Sanderson work could be all that great because of this.
Another challenge is trying to visually represent what’s going on in Mistborn, anyway. It works great in literary form because articulating the various powers requires a lot of interior exposition. That would be somewhat challenging to translate to the big screen.