If you ask me, The Wheel of Time is the most exciting fantasy adaptation to appear on the horizon since HBO started adapting George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire over a decade ago. The series, which is based on Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s 14-book strong epic, will tell a sweeping story with a ton of characters caught up in the flow of history, all of it brought to life with Amazon’s considerable budget.
I’ll just let star Rosamund Pike speak for herself. She plays Moiraine Damodred, a sorceress who comes to the sleepy backwater town of Emond’s Field searching for something. “It is a fantasy world grounded very much in a reality,” Pike told Balance Media. “It is a world in which there is magic and tremendous power, but they are also very human.”
"It is a very rich world. Robert Jordan was a veteran of the Vietnam War and he was striving for balance – he was trying to make sense of a world torn apart. It’s all about how our actions affect the future and what responsibility one takes, in this, your life on earth. We have these great weather patterns storming through us, that are so relevant. It’s great – it’s a big world of epic adventure."
All of that checks out, but perhaps most important to us as viewers is the new information about when The Wheel of Time is coming out: Balance Media confirms that it will be available on Amazon in 2021.
And that sounds about right. The show is filming right now and will probably have wrapped with plenty of time left in the year, but the scale of the production will require a lot of post-production work. I’m not surprised to hear it may take a while to get everything in order.
A throwback to Day 1 on the #WOTonPrime set. Can you tell where we were? pic.twitter.com/WDTIiNfpI2
— The Wheel Of Time (@TheWheelOfTime) February 19, 2020
If I had to guess, I’d say that The Wheel of Time would be out relatively early in 2021, meaning that Amazon’s other big fantasy series — its Lord of the Rings show — will probably come out late in the year, if not in 2022.
But we have a while longer to mull over all of that. Back to Pike, who talked about being drawn to the character of Moiraine: “I’ve played a lot of intelligent women who have suffered a huge amount and I wanted to do something different and explore some different things.”
"And one thing about Moraine, my character, is that she has tremendous calm. She’s quite enigmatic and very layered. She has many facets. Her outward seeming thing is that she’s very calm and I thought, ‘There’s a reason this has come into my life!’ She is very calm, and yet within her she knows she has tremendous power, and that’s very interesting."
Anyone who’s read The Eye of the World, the first book in the cycle, will find that description pretty accurate. Viva 2021!
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h/t The Wertzone