The third season of The Wheel of Time, an adaptation of Robert Jordan's beloved epic fantasy books, is off and running on Prime Video, and so far, it's crushing it. Hopefully, the season is successful enough that Prime Video renews the show for more seasons, and fans will get to watch the whole story play out.
In the meanwhile, Wheel of Time spinoffs are bubbling in the background. We heard a while back that someone was trying to get a live-action trilogy of prequel movies off the ground; the first movie, The Age of Legends, is set to be directed by Kari Skogland, who previously worked on shows like The Walking Dead and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
These movies will be set thousands of years before the main events of The Wheel of Time TV show. We've seen that series visit the Age of Legends in flashbacks; characters like Lanfear and Ishamael were still around back then, not to mention Lews Therin, who was the Dragon before his spirit was reborn in the body of a farmboy named Rand al'Thor.
So does that mean that actors from The Wheel of Time TV show will also appear in these prequels? If we listen to showrunner Rafe Judkins, it sure doesn't sound like it. "It doesn't have anything to do with the TV show," he told ScreenRant. "That's from a separate rights holder group."
What is this rights holder group? That would be iwot Productions, formerly Red Eagle Entertainment. If you're a long-time Wheel of Time fan, that name might ring an alarm for you. Red Eagle was the group that, in 2015, produced a terrible pilot for a Wheel of Time TV show that aired in the dead of night on FXX Productions; Robert Jordan's widow Harriet McDougal said she was "dumbfounded" by the move, which apparently was made purely so Red Eagle could keep their rights to the franchise (the pilot aired days before they were going to lapse).
Before that, back in 2007, Robert Jordan himself wrote a blog post about how displeased he was with Red Eagle:
"I hear that word was floating about Comics Con in San Diego that I am displeased with Red Eagle. Too true. Too very true. In a few more months that last contract they have with anyone on God’s green earth that so much as mentions my name will come to an end and we can see what happens after that. You see, among other things they forgot an old dictum of LBJ back when he was just a Congressman from Texas, when he famously, or infamously, said “Don’t spit in the soup, boys. We all have to eat.” Worse, Red Eagle though they could tell me they spit in the soup, or pee in it, if they wanted to and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop them. You can’t apologize your way out of that with me, not that they tried. There isn’t enough money in the world to buy your way out of it with me. Not that they tried that either. So they get no further help from me. Once they are completely out of the picture, we’ll see what happens."
I'm not sure of all the details, but clearly Jordan wasn't happy with whatever Red Eagle was doing with the screen rights to The Wheel of Time back then, and it doesn't feel like they've been any more responsible since then. iwot has also been working on a "Wheel of Time" AI...but no one seems to know exactly what that means. It feels like they saw that people were talking about AI a lot and figured that throwing the words "Wheel of Time" in front of it would do...something?
All this is to say that I wouldn't count on these Wheel of Time prequel movies actually coming to fruition. And if they do, I wouldn't count on them making many people happy. In the meanwhile, Prime Video's show marches on. New episodes drop Thursdays.
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