The news that Prime Video cancelled The Wheel of Time came as a devastating surprise to fans. The series ascended to new heights with its recently released third season, and the beloved fantasy novel series penned by Robert Jordan—finished by Brandon Sanderson—appeared to finally be getting the onscreen adaptation it deserved.
Despite a rocky and uneven first season, the series steadily improved and tried to address the audience’s early misgivings, putting out a solid second season and an incredible season 3. No episode in season 3 scored lower than 8/10 stars on IMDb, and the series' best episode yet, “The Road to the Spear,” hit a series high of 9.2, putting it up with episodes from such famous fantasy series as Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon.
As of writing, there is an elaborate ongoing effort by fans to revive the series, but the prognosis is not looking good; Deadline reported that the decision to cancel the series was a financial one, adding that Prime Video was actually happy with the quality of the show. This begs the question: Should The Wheel of Time have been an animated series all along?
This is a tough question to ask in light of the stellar performances and production value that the cast and crew brought to the set. Rosamund Pike, who played Moiraine Damodred (and also produced the series), brought to the small screen all of the emotional complexity of a deeply mysterious female character. Caera Coveney, who played Elayne, looked and sounded as if she had waltzed right off Jordan’s pages and onto our television screens. Donal Finn, a season 2 recast of the popular character Mat, amused and entertained the audience to no end.
With a strong ensemble cast, these are just a few of the outstanding performances that characterized The Wheel of Time’s live-action adaptation. Coupled with intense action sequences and an excellent budget for both CGI and on-site filming, these performances created a fantasy series with a level of quality that would have been unthinkable in the pre-Game of Thrones era.
However, the Wheel of Time novel series is very well known across the fantasy readership for several traits that consistently challenged the production team. Jordan’s series is known above all for its sprawling scope, epic scale, and complex and enrapturing displays of magic. In the 14 main WoT novels, dozens of POV characters and the nearly three thousand named characters that surround them journey across many lands, nations, and even worlds to tell a gripping, fantastical story of life, death, rebirth, and apocalyptic change.
Magic is everywhere, and its uses are both mundane (burning a hole in a door) and apocalyptic (annihilating entire cities out of time and space). It is also extremely complex, with each spell the characters use taking one or more of the five elements of the WoT world: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit. The magic comes in male and female versions and also a darker form that allows people to directly tap into the “Dark One’s” own essence… and it just gets more complex from there.
Personally, I think the creatives and CGI masters behind illustrating this in the series’ second and third seasons did a brilliant job, but I shudder to think what percentage of the series budget was getting soaked up by even a few minutes of such displays.
It is important to note that other successful fantasy series, such as Game of Thrones, actually stayed away from magic for most of their episodes or used old-school Hollywood tricks and practical effects when they had to. Other series that use manipulation of the elements, such as Avatar: The Last Airbender or its sequel, The Legend of Korra, used hand-drawn animation to draw complex magic that Netflix is now spending a fortune to do a paler imitation of in live-action.
An animated Wheel of Time adaptation could have taken a similar approach, using anime-style animation to portray the many moments of magic that happen over the series.
Drowning the Wheel of Time’s budget even further is the multitude of locations and locales that the characters must visit in order to successfully adapt the novel series. While the characters range farther in some individual novels than in others, it is not uncommon for a dozen different countries or cultures to be portrayed in each novel (and therefore season).
While the series showrunner, Rafe Judkins, and his team of writers put their all into creating the shining White Tower, the mesas of Cold Rocks Hold, and the pirate den of Tanchico, the series would have needed to frequently hit those high levels of production over and over again as the story progressed, and they would need to keep the old sets around as well, as the characters often return to their old haunts.
MILD SPOILER: A couple of seasons from now, the main character, Rand, will invent something called Travelling that allows him to magically leap from one location in the world to the next in only a step, and then the characters really start to bounce around. Presumably, Judkins would have tried to simplify this in ways that reduced the number of locations and still embraced the spirit of the story. I give ample credit for Prime Video letting The Wheel of Time film on location rather than in a Disney-esque theater studio, but it would not be cheap going forward. Those travel expenses drop off a cliff when it’s a team of animators drawing together.
What would have hurt The Wheel of Time the most going forward, and would have been drastically easier to do for an animated series, is the scale of action. While the first three novels in the series stick to fairly small skirmishes as the main characters quest their way across the continent, starting with book 4, The Shadow Rising, things start to get bigger and bigger. The fifth novel of the series, The Fires of Heaven, climaxes with a battle of over 300,000 soldiers fighting within, outside, and around a major city.
There are ways to do this with live action, as Peter Jackson taught us all with The Return of the King, but it seems studios have grown allergic to hiring large numbers of extras in recent years, with only major films such as Dune or its sequel meriting the investment. It’s a shame that this is what the industry has come to, as there are many not-so-famous actors out there looking to make a living as extras, and as anyone who has seen the Hobbit trilogy can tell you, extras in makeup beat CGI every time.
Even the largest shows of their era (looking at you, Game of Thrones) limited themselves to a couple of big set pieces per season. The Wheel of Time novels are bursting with battles and crowds galore, and it would have been hard for the team to write their way out of all of them. Remember: the 1998 film Mulan had thousands of animated Huns pour over a mountain ridge only to be killed by a massive avalanche in an epic scene set to a beautiful score—and the live-action version of the film never even attempted anything like it.
Finally, Wheel of Time is a famously long novel series, and Judkins knew he could never adapt everything. While some series do last 14 seasons, they usually aren’t big-budget high fantasy series but procedurals such as CSI or NCIS. People age a lot in 14 years, so even if Prime Video was able to put out a season a year (and that would be unheard of for a live-action fantasy series in 2025), they would have to keep actors, directors, cinematographers, and everyone else involved in production locked into absurdly long contracts or risk the price of hiring them back each season sky-rocketing.
While this, to some degree, is also applicable to animators and voice actors, it is less so; you can switch out an animator without anyone noticing if they have a similar style, and voice actors have been changed before without too much fuss.
Right now, thousands of people around the world are trying to get Amazon to change its mind and bring back the Wheel of Time. Personally, I sympathize with that and with the cast and crew. But it begs the question, while Amazon still has the rights, should we be urging them in a different direction entirely?
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