A couple months back, Showtime opted not to produce a show based on Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle books, although showrunner John Rogers had reportedly already put together an outline for a first season and penned a couple of scripts. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the guy behind Hamilton, was writing the music, and it sounded like he was pretty deep into it.
Lay of Sir Savien has me sh*tting my pants. Not ready yet. Already have sketches for Lady Lackless and Chandrian rhyming tune, did those for fun from the book. https://t.co/AauBnvtP5J
— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) July 30, 2018
Still, the show isn’t going forward, at least for now. Lionsgate TV is shopping it around, but we’ve heard nothing. During a recent Reddit AMA with Miranda, who’s promoting his role in the HBO series His Dark Materials, a fan brought up the series. “What’s it been like working on music for the show?” they asked. Said Miranda:
"The honest answer? We haven’t cracked it. As you know, it’s an incredibly rich story and complex world. When we crack it, there’ll be news. But not before it’s absolutely right. Working with Pat has been a total joy."
If you ask me, we probably won’t be hearing news anytime soon. For a while, the Killkiller project has felt…off. For one thing, the show isn’t actually an adaptation of the Kingkiller Chronicle, which follows a young musician/magician/martial artist/sex god named Kvothe as he searches for the mysterious group that killed his parents when he was a boy. Instead, it was to follow a troupe of traveling musicians — possibly Kvothe’s parents, it’s unclear — as they wandered around Temerant, Rothfuss’ fictional world. Lionsgate is also trying to make a series of movies that actually adapts the books, but we haven’t heard much about those in a long while, either.
It always struck me as weird that Lionsgate was trying to adapt the base novels — The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear are the two published so far — and a prequel at the same time. Like…why not give us the original story and then see if there’s enough interest to make a prequel, at least? With the people on top making those kinds of decisions, I’m not shocked to hear there are some internal problems. Hopefully the show and movies don’t get stuck in development hell. If there was ever a time to get a good version of the Kingkiller Chronicle on TV, it’s now, with everyone trying to make genre shows that can follow in the footsteps of Game of Thrones.
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For now, we’ll watch and wait. If Rothfuss got the third book in his trilogy — The Doors of Stone — into our hands, it might help renew interest in a movie or TV series. Unfortunately, he’s been writing that book since 2011, and apparently it’s going slowly. Rothfuss is a little like a younger George R.R. Martin that way. We’re pulling for both of them.
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h/t Newsweek