It sounds like we won't be watching Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere on the big screen any time soon.
We're only a few short days away from Christmas, and you know what that means: it's the time of the year when author Brandon Sanderson publishes his yearly "State of the Sanderson" blog post, going over everything he did in the previous year and everything he hopes to do in the immediate future. Sanderson has made a habit of writing these posts going back to 2013, and they've very popular with fans thanks to the author's candor about his various works.
This year's State of the Sanderson is a monstrously long post, as could be expected from a year where Sanderson wrapped up the first arc of his epic fantasy series The Stormlight Archive. There's a ton to parse in there, from the future of Stormlight and Mistborn, to his timeline for his next books, crowdfunding fulfillment statuses, and how things are going overall at his company Dragonsteel. But one thing that stands out is Sanderson's lengthy breakdown of the process of getting books made into television shows and movies — along with an update about a possible Mistborn movie falling through. He's "back to square one" when it comes to adapting his Cosmere books for the screen.
Sanderson first announced that he was working on a screenplay for Mistborn: The Final Empire back in 2020, and since then it has remained a priority for the author as a first step to getting his fictional universe, known as the Cosmere, onto the screen. In this year's blog post, Sanderson reveals that Mistborn "did a lot more internal development than is usual" before it was pitched to studios, meaning that if any studio had gotten behind the project, it likely would have gone straight into production. Alas, while there was interest from studios, none were ultimately willing to commit to making a Mistborn movie.
"It got offers of development deals from studios, but no production deal, and the partners I had did not want to go back to script after all the work they did," Sanderson explained, adding that the studios "didn't want to do it the way the producers did" and the project subsequently "died."
Sanderson had been teasing something big at this year's Dragonsteel Nexus, and many fans speculated it may have been a film announcement. That reveal turned out to be for The Wheel of Time leatherbound editions that Sanderson's company Dragonsteel will be producing starting in 2025. Sanderson said he was "so hopeful" he could share an announcement with fans because of how late in the development process the Mistborn movie was, but it wasn't meant to be.
The author even added that "stars were attached" for the film. "No, Henry . was not one of them. Yes, you'd recognize some of the names. No, I can't tell them to you."
"That’s everything, I’m afraid," Sanderson continued. "I’ve said no to several offers on Cosmere properties over the last five years, as I was all-in on getting the Mistborn film made. Now that that has fallen through, I’m back to square one, basically, on the Cosmere."
Several other Sanderson projects are in various stages of film development
While this isn't great news for the Cosmere on screen, Sanderson did reveal that he has a couple of other film projects in the works. The first of those is Snapshot, based on a 2017 sci-fi novella of the same name about two detectives trying to solve a grisly mass murder by entering into "snapshots" of elapsed days. This allows them to investigate in an alternate world which recreates the real world, and then bring their findings back to crack the case.
Sanderson said that Snapshot already has a studio attached and is in development for television, "so actually quite far along" in the adaptation process.
The other Sanderson property in the film pipeline is Skyward, a YA story about a young woman who discovers an alien spacecraft; it's basically Sanderson's take on How To Train Your Dragon, but with a spaceship instead of a dragon. That one "has been optioned for television, and is looking for a showrunner." So it's still on the earlier side of the process, but moving along.
Beyond those two, the only other film project Sanderson mentions is Tress of the Emerald Sea, a standalone Cosmere novella which draws some tonal inspiration from The Princess Bride, which Sanderson has been pitching around as an animated series and hopes to see optioned for film in the near future.
"I do hold the rights currently for everything except Skyward and Snapshot," he said. "I hope to be able to announce the creative teams involved with those two for you soon enough—but I’ve learned that building hype before we have too much progress is counterproductive, so let’s keep our expectations tempered for now."
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