The Wheel of Time showrunner departs God of War TV show as Amazon tosses out scripts

With the success of recent TV adaptations of popular video game franchises — none more notable than HBO’s The Last of Us and Amazon Prime’s Fallout — studios everywhere are looking for more titles to transform from interactive entertainment into the strictly viewable kind. In spite of their success with Fallout, however, Amazon appears to be struggling with their other major video game adaptation: God of War.

The A.V Club recently reported that the streaming giant has trashed multiple iterations of scripts for God of War season 1. Showrunner Rafe Judkins, who is also the showrunner on Amazon's The Wheel of Time series, is no longer working on God of War. The same goes for executive producers Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus.

So it sounds like they're going back to the drawing board. To replace Judkins, Amazon is bringing in Ronald D. Moore, a bit of a TV legend who worked on multiple Star Trek shows, rebooted Battlestar Galactica, and developed Outlander for the small screen. His experience inspires confidence.

Amazon first hinted at the show’s existence in 2022, riding the wave of the hype generated by the impending release of the game God of War: Ragnarok. And the community was pumped. However, since that initial wave of good press, the show appears to have hit roadblock after roadblock, underscoring just how difficult it is to keep studio executives happy while also trying to do justice to a beloved franchise held dear by some of the most infamously hard-to-please fans out there: gamers.

Amazon and Sony are co-producing God of War, which adds yet another layer of difficulty, as Sony’s overlords are obviously keen not to butcher one of PlayStation’s tentpole franchises. The repeated trashing of Ostby and Fergus’ scripts is part and parcel to this awkward co-management structure that may very well lead to more conflict down the road.

When it comes to what’s next for God of War, we’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, we’re going to keep our ears to the ground, listening for whether the new production team decides to hew closer to the video games’ story or tell a new one altogether.

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