Brandon Sanderson has officially announced that his sci-fi novel Skyward is being adapted for TV. The production company is locked in and the showrunners are on board.
Sanderson himself is co-writing the pilot script. There's just one fairly important thing still missing: a streamer or network to actually release it.
Brandon Sanderson’s latest weekly update
Speaking candidly in his latest weekly update video filmed at Forbidden Planet in London, Sanderson didn't try to dress it up. "We announced the Skyward adaptation. This is Premium Cable. We haven't picked a streamer yet," he said.
The production company attached to the project is Tomorrow Studios, the indie house best known for turning Eiichiro Oda's One Piece manga into one of Netflix's biggest live-action hits of 2023. Tomorrow Studios is an ITV Studios partnership, run by CEO Marty Adelstein and president Becky Clements, both of whom will executive produce the Skyward series.
Sanderson explained in his update that his relationship with Tomorrow Studios goes back years.
"I actually started meeting with them like four or five years ago. It was right after the One Piece television show came out that I sat down seriously with them. I'd taken some meetings earlier, but this was the first time I'm like, 'All right, you really can make things that are good,'" he said.
That's a pretty direct endorsement. Sanderson watched what Tomorrow Studios did with One Piece and decided they were the right team to handle his work. He continued: "There's a really cool exec there that I liked a lot. We talked for a long while and eventually we said yes. And so that's been in the works for quite a while."
The showrunning team is Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, who led all seven seasons of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on ABC. Sanderson will co-write the pilot script alongside them, and all three will executive produce.
Sanderson had nothing but good things to say about them in his update: "It's Mo and Jed. They were the showrunners of Agents of Shield and they are fantastic people. They've been really good to work with and so we're working on that."
In the official press statement, Sanderson also said: "I've been working on the Skyward series for nearly a decade, and to have a partner like Tomorrow Studios to help bring this story to television is a dream come true."
What Skyward is all about
Published in 2018, Skyward is the first book in Sanderson's Cytoverse series, a five-book sci-fi franchise separate from his sprawling Cosmere universe (which includes Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive).
The story follows Spensa Nightshade, a young woman living on a harsh planet under constant attack from mysterious alien forces. Her disgraced father was branded a coward and she's determined to prove him and herself worthy by becoming a fighter pilot. It's one of Sanderson's more accessible, YA-leaning works, which makes it well suited for a broad TV audience.
It's worth noting that this is not Sanderson's first attempt at getting Skyward to screen. Universal Television previously purchased the rights back in 2020, but that arrangement never produced anything. Tomorrow Studios is the second bite at the apple.
This announcement didn't exactly come out of nowhere for fans who've been paying attention. In his 2024 State of Sanderson blog post, Sanderson confirmed the series had been optioned and that his team was searching for a showrunner. By 2025, he was sounding more optimistic, writing that showrunners had been found and that the pilot was actively being written.
Now, in May 2026, it's officially public and Sanderson acknowledged in his video that he'd been keeping it quiet for a while.
So... where could we watch it?
That's the big open question. The project is currently at the pilot stage with no network or streaming platform attached. Tomorrow Studios has worked with Netflix (One Piece, Cowboy Bebop), Apple TV (Physical), and TNT/AMC (Snowpiercer) in the past, so the door is wide open.
The Skyward/Cytoverse rights are held independently by Tomorrow Studios, separate from the broader Apple TV deal covering Sanderson's Cosmere titles like Mistborn and Stormlight Archive. So Apple is not the automatic default here.
The question of where Skyward lands will likely be one of the more closely watched deals in genre TV this year.
Add us as a preferred source on Google