Marvel writer working on The Wheel of Time movie trilogy

Amazon Studios and Sony Pictures Television are currently working on a TV adaptation of Robert Jordan’s massive The Wheel of Time series, a fantasy landmark that spans 14 books. We just recently got an official teaser and learned the show will premiere this year!

You’d figure that show would be enough to satiate Wheel of Time fans for a minute, but The Hollywood Reporter has it that Thor and X-Men: First Class writer Zack Stentz has been hired to work on the script for a Wheel of Time movie called Age of Legends, the first in a planned trilogy.

Age of Legends will be set millennia before The Wheel of Time proper, in a “futuristic utopia” built around the One Power, a magical force that can be accessed by both men and women. An unspeakable evil taints the male half of the One Power, meaning that any men who try to use it go insane. A band of women unite to fight back the darkness. This story will be familiar to Wheel of Time fans; it’s part of the books’ prehistory, although we don’t explore it in detail.

Multiple The Wheel of Time projects are coming

No studio partner or distributor for Age of Legends has been named, although THR says that the movies will “complement” the Amazon show, so my guess is that there’s some kind of coordination.

Do we need a Wheel of Time movie trilogy in addition to the upcoming show, which could run for years to come if they plan to adapt the whole series? To me, it kind of feels like Hollywood is trying to will a cinematic universe into existence from nothing, which I’m not a fan of. It reminds me of when Lionsgate was developing movies based on Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicle at the same time that Showtime was making a prequel TV series. What’s wrong with adapting the base thing first and then seeing if there’s an appetite for a spinoff or prequel? Why jump right to franchise?

The answer, I suspect, has to do with studios looking at how successful Marvel has been with its  own cinematic universe and saying, “I want that.” Will it work? We’ll see, although I’ll note that both of those Kingkiller projects are stalled, perhaps never to move forward again.

As for Amazon’s The Wheel of Time show, expect to hear (and see) more about it at Comic-Con later this month.

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