Brandon Sanderson Books: Why ‘The Stormlight Archive’ Finally Feels Ready for the Screen

Hollywood has been trying to bring Brandon Sanderson’s books to the screen for years. But with Mistborn now in development as a feature film and The Stormlight Archive planned as a premium television series through Apple, it might seem like the bestselling author has finally found the right moment—which will allow his fantasy series to join the ranks of forthcoming shows based on ACOTAR and Fourth Wing, among others.

In truth, this “quest” began nearly a decade ago with a decision that surprised many of his fans: he stopped selling the film and television rights to his books.

“This is to head off the questions that I’m sure I’m going to get so that way you don’t have to waste your question on asking this,” Sanderson joked during a recent appearance at MCM Comic Con London before launching into the story behind the long-awaited adaptations. “For those who don’t know, I made a weird ploy with one of my friends to try and make Mistborn a number of years ago. And while my friend and I were working on that, I took all of my books off the market in Hollywood. I just thought I want to take some time, reassess and figure out what I’m doing.

“Early in my career,” he added, “I would just sell the rights to basically anyone who asked. I was, like, ‘I’m a new author. You want to give me money? All right, I will take your money.’ And I got both lucky and unlucky in that none of those ever got made. People often ask, ‘Brandon, when are you going to get an adaptation?’ and I kind of weathered through everything that was happening with streaming and all of these things and I kept the rights. After those early ones, starting about 10 years ago, I just didn’t sell anything. I sat on it all and I wanted to see how things shook out and I really wanted to see how our crowdfunding went.”

Rather than rushing back into Hollywood, Sanderson watched his own career reach new heights. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he quietly wrote four surprise novels without telling his publisher or even much of his team, later revealing them in a video that stunned fans. The resulting Kickstarter campaign for what became known as the “Secret Projects” raised more than $41 million, shattering crowdfunding records and proving just how passionate—and numerous—his readers had become. That success gave Sanderson the freedom to wait for the right Hollywood partner instead of simply accepting the next offer that came along. 

“Well, it turns out the crowdfunding went very well and the Secret Projects thing happened and then Hollywood came knocking. About this time I decided I was going to try again, but I had locked up Mistborn and Stormlight with some of these other things I was doing. Maybe three years ago a group called Tomorrow Studio came to me and they said, ‘Hey, we’re interested in adapting your stuff.’ And I said, ‘Well, Mistborn and Stormlight, which is what everybody wants, are locked up.’ And they said, ‘We actually want Skyward. We really like Skyward.’”

“Tomorrow Studio,” he elaborated, “had a show coming out in just a few months at that point. It was the One Piece adaptation. And I know a little bit about how particular some of the mangakas are when it comes to their adaptations, so I thought I would go and watch One Piece and see what the creator thought of that. I was quite impressed with it. I think they did an excellent job. I know that the creator, Oda, really liked how the adaptation went, so we went and started negotiations and that was like three years ago. These things take forever for us to be able to announce. Now we have.”

Building worlds

While Hollywood negotiations centered on Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive, they represent only part of the storytelling universe Sanderson has created over the past two decades.

Skyward is his young adult science fiction series following Spensa, a determined teenage pilot fighting to protect the last remnants of humanity after they’re driven to a distant planet by an alien threat. Blending aerial combat, mystery and coming-of-age storytelling, the books showcase a very different side of Sanderson’s imagination than his sprawling fantasy epics.

First published in 2006, Mistborn launched his bestselling fantasy saga set in a world where ash falls from the sky and a tyrannical immortal ruler has held power for a thousand years. Combining an inventive magic system with the structure of a classic heist story, it’s the property Sanderson has long envisioned as a feature film.

Then, in 2010, came The Way of Kings, the opening volume of The Stormlight Archive. Set on Roshar, a world ravaged by massive storms where ancient orders of knights once protected civilization, the planned 10-book epic has become one of modern fantasy’s defining series. And, as Sanderson explains, the idea for that remarkable world began with two very different experiences from his own life.

“I would say the first idea for Stormlight was indeed a storm. At the time that I was working on this book, I had a roommate, Micah Demoux. Micah was a photography major who loved landscape photography. It so happens that we both lived in one of the best states in the United States for visiting national parks and great grand vistas, Utah, which is gorgeous. I grew up in Nebraska. There are definitely things that I love about Nebraska, but it’s not a place where there are a lot of sweeping vistas and beautiful canyons.”

As the two explored Utah’s slot canyons together, one conversation unexpectedly sparked Sanderson’s imagination.

“One time as we were traveling, he was really worried and I said, ‘Well, why?’ He’s, like, ‘Well, there’s supposed to be some rain today. You don’t understand how slot canyons work, do you?’ All of the rainfall across a wide plain seeks the lowest point, which means that it finds its way into this little slot in the ground and it can immediately turn a slot canyon into a powerful flash flood.”

That moment connected two experiences Sanderson had never thought of together: the powerful thunderstorms of his Nebraska childhood and the dramatic landscapes of southern Utah. “That was the seed. That traveling through the slot canyon, imagining the rain, imagining what would happen in one of these slot canyons if they were in a land where the thunderstorms were more like what happened in Nebraska. It was that confluence of two powerful images—of me sitting on the porch and watching rain blow the wrong direction, and traveling with Micah through this alien land within the slot canyons… This was the beginning of The Stormlight Archive, these two images, one from my childhood and one from my college years. Combining those in my head, I began with this idea of, ‘All right, I want a world that’s hit by a massive thunderstorm.'”

Forward progression

Getting the rights back to both Mistborn and Stormlight, Sanderson had the luxury of deciding what he really wanted to do with them. “About a year ago,” he detailed, “I took them to Hollywood and did all the pitches with all the different places and I settled on Apple. Basically everybody in Hollywood made an offer, and they were all pretty good offers. I ended up picking Apple because I feel like they do fewer things better. I really like how they’ve done a lot of their adaptations, particularly sci-fi fantasy. And so my focus with them is a Mistborn feature film first and then a Stormlight premium cable show. The feature film in the contracts is required to be wide-release in theaters and I am working on the screenplay right now.”

Sanderson has since revealed that he’ll write the Mistborn screenplay by himself and serve as co-showrunner on The Stormlight Archive. That hands-on role didn’t happen by accident, growing instead out of frustrations he experienced years earlier after seeing other writers adapt his work.

“I started writing screenplays again about 10 years ago. It was actually a little earlier than that after getting some truly dreadful screenplays based on my books turned in. I had for years kind of thought, ‘I shouldn’t write my own screenplays, right?’ But then I got some of these screenplays in and once in a while they were fantastic, but a lot of the time I’m, like, ‘No, no, I can do that.’ So I started teaching myself to write screenplays. Mistborn will be my sixth screenplay. The first couple were disasters, absolute disasters, but screenplays four and five are actually pretty good. I feel pretty good about my screenwriting abilities now.”

That experience also changed the way he looked at adapting his own novels. Rather than trying to squeeze every page of a book onto the screen, he came to believe that successful adaptations require a different approach—one that respects the original while recognizing different mediums have to tell stories in their own way. Additionally, watching other fantasy series make the leap from page to screen convinced him that faithfulness isn’t measured by how many scenes survive intact, but by whether the heart of the story does.

“As I’m working on the Mistborn films myself,” he shared, “this has been one of the key things I’ve realized: I can take almost every scene from the book and I can bring them in and use them in some way. What makes a good adaptation is keeping to the soul of the story and not throwing anything away from the original without good reason. But that good reason can be it’s a new medium and you just have to do it differently.”

After spending nearly a decade making sure Hollywood was the right fit, Sanderson is more optimistic than he’s been in years.

“I just got back yesterday from Hollywood, had a bunch of meetings with Apple and they all went really well,” he offered. “This feels really different this time. I think this one is really going to happen. It’s no guarantee… we’re still not very far along. These aren’t coming next year, but I’m confident. Confident this time that it’s going to go really well. So follow along, join me as I write the screenplay and hear me grouse about how difficult it is to take a 200,000-word book and condense it to a two-hour movie.”

Brandon Sanderson and The Stormlight Archive fast facts

• Genre: Epic fantasy
• Author: Brandon Sanderson
• First novel: The Way of Kings (2010)
• Latest novel: Wind and Truth (2024)
• Second book: Words of Radiance
• Fourth book: Rhythm of War
• Series length: Planned 10-book epic
• Connected universe: The Cosmere
• Companion books: Arcanum Unbounded, Edgedancer and Dawnshard
• Related series: Mistborn, Skyward, Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter
• Inspired by: In part, Sanderson’s admiration for Robert Jordan and The Wheel of Time
• Current adaptation plans: Mistborn as a theatrical film and The Stormlight Archive as a television series
• Bestseller status: Multiple-time New York Times bestselling author