Earlier in December, fantasy author Brandon Sanderson posted his yearly "State of the Sanderson" blog post, where he went over everything he'd worked on in the past year and everything he plans to get to in the next few years. These posts are very popular with fans, largely because Sanderson always reveals some morsel or other of news that can't be gotten anywhere else. And in this year's post, some of the secrets Sanderson dropped were big.
For example, the author revealed that the Mistborn film project he's been trying to get off the ground for the last half a decade has, unfortunately, been scrapped. This puts Sanderson "back to square one" on the Mistborn movie, and Cosmere adaptations as a whole.
Now that Sanderson has let us all down as easily as he could, he's opening up a bit more about what that Mistborn project looked like. And, surprise surprise, it wasn't just a Mistborn film, but a film series and a TV show.
"I will say our plan for what we were doing was hybrid: a giant, big budget, first film followed by a season of television covering the year between books one and two which would include all the cut content from film one that is in the books. Movie two would follow book two, then a season between," Sanderson explained to fans on Reddit. "Key actors were signed for both film and television season. But alas, we just could not get the greenlight. We picked the absolutely wrong time to be pitching a big, new, expensive IP to Hollywood. Hopefully, with things looking up this year, it will go better moving forward."
Mistborn had already cast Vin, would have been movies and a TV show
This Mistborn film project would have covered the original trilogy of books: Mistborn: The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages. Those novels compose a fairly tight epic fantasy story about a gang of thieves and con artists who go up against an immortal god-emperor who rules over a world plagued by ashfalls, monsters, and pervasive mists. In true Sanderson fashion, things spiral in unexpected directions after that initial confrontation, as the secrets of the fantasy world of Scadrial are laid bare.
At the heart of that trilogy is Vin, a young street thief who has the powers of a Mistborn — meaning that she can access every type of metal-based magic (called Allomancy) on this world, as opposed to the one or two powers most people have. Vin is one of Sanderson's most beloved characters, and it would have been thrilling to see her onscreen.
Sanderson confirmed that Vin was one of the key roles for Mistborn that had been cast, though he's "still not telling" the identity of the actor. Unfortunately, development dragged on for so many years that she had practically aged out of the part by the time the Mistborn movies and show were shelved, with Sanderson saying she's "now in her mid 20's, not her late teens, as we spent five years in development."
According to Sanderson, this is one of a number of reasons why it would be difficult for another studio to step in and pick up this Mistborn project. Instead, he thinks it's more likely that if a new studio were to show interest in Mistborn, they would probably toss it all out and start over from scratch.
"One of the issues with Hollywood tends to be that whenever someone takes over on a project, they throw away everything that came before, because they want to do it their way," he explained. "This is understandable, to an extent, but it causes HUGE budget inflation. So for this to work, you'd need an executive team AND director who both want to keep the material AS IS and not start over. Tough to find in Hollywood, though it is something I would like to do, if the right partner were willing."
Why Brandon Sanderson wants Mistborn to be movies instead of just a TV show
The hybrid model that Sanderson mentioned above is interesting, and feels pretty fitting considering the author's own tendency to weave his various novels and short stories together into a larger saga. There's no doubt that Mistborn movies would inevitably have to cut some material from their fairly dense source books. But what about just sticking to television? After all, with shows like House of the Dragon, The Wheel of Time, and The Witcher on the air, there are plenty of examples of fantasy working well on the small screen.
"I can tell you that it would be much easier to get a Mistborn television show off the ground than a film," Sanderson replied when asked this very question. "But here's my problem: what television properties, especially on premium cable, have made lasting impact on popular culture? Take a popular and well made show like Shadow and Bone, and compare it to an okay film series like, say, Maze Runner. Do a google trends search on that right now, if you want."
I'll save you the trouble of doing the Google Trends search yourself: the search popularity for the Maze Runner movies is far more stable over time than Shadow and Bone, which spiked during the couple of months leading up to each season premiere and then completely bottomed out. Maze Runner, by contrast, never quite hits the same lows in search traffic, with periodic, seemingly random spikes. Despite the fact that the last Maze Runner movie came out back in 2018, its search traffic remains far more consistent than Shadow and Bone to this day.
It's easy to see the point Sanderson is trying to make here, not that Maze Runner is better than these shows, but that by nature of the way movies are marketed and treated as a medium, the chances of them having more enduring appeal are higher. That's especially true in our streaming age, where platforms like Netflix often barely market their series and are immediately moving on to the next thing mere days after the last released.
"The audience of streamers is so fragmented, and people double-screen so often, that things just don't get traction very often. You can even take something fantastic like Arcane, and ask if your grandparents/parents would watch it. My mother would never be interested — but she went to the Lord of the Rings films because they were EVENTS," Sanderson continued. "Beyond that, budgets there are getting slashed in streaming too. Do we really want to make a Mistborn series on a budget, to just be held up beside other shows getting five times the budget?"
I can only nod in agreement with Sanderson's points, even if the contrarian in me wants to argue about the cultural impact of shows like Game of Thrones or Stranger Things. Even at the movies, the idea that films need to feel like "events" to draw audiences is something Hollywood has been reckoning with in recent years, with swift releases to streaming often undercutting box office runs. It's likely we'll have an interesting couple of years ahead on the film and TV front.
But alas, one project we aren't likely to see in the immediate term is Mistborn. Hopefully one day Sanderson finds the right partner to bring this series to the screen. Until then, at least we've got plenty of Cosmere books to read. The latest is Wind and Truth, the fifth book in Sanderson's massive epic fantasy series The Stormlight Archive. With that on shelves, the author is turning his attention to writing the next era of Mistborn novels, set around 350 years after Vin and her companions fought to save Scadrial. We'll be reading.
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