I'm sure many of my readers have heard the name Brandon Sanderson, and if you haven't yet, you will soon.
Sanderson is someone that I personally look up to as a fiction writer, as his worldbuilding is nothing short of visionary. I'm still trying to work my way through his Cosmere, the world Sanderson created through many worlds he built that he tied together. It's hard to keep up with, because Sanderson is the kind of guy who could fall asleep at his desk and accidentally write a novel while he was snoozing.
His most popular book is, arguably, The Way of Kings, which is 1,000 pages of pure genius that I can't possibly summarize for you, but if you want someone to do it entertainingly, you can watch this 48-minute-long video because that's about how long it would take to summarize this story.
And that's only one of the books of the Cosmere.
His worlds are so original and intricate that adapting them to the screen would be nearly impossible for Hollywood. Not because they couldn't do it, but because they wouldn't. Hollywood has a bad habit of getting in its own way with its focus on modern DEI concerns that would put more focus on representation and stories by committee than actually telling the tale that was intended by the author.
While my books aren't close to being published yet, even I knew that, should my grand epic ever be adapted to the screen, I would never hand it off to Hollywood. It'd fair far better in the hands of a Japanese anime studio that would actually adapt the story as closely as possible, and I wouldn't have to worry once about someone in a producer chair saying "the main character needs to be black and a lesbian."
Yet, Sanderson just pulled off something incredible.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, many studio heads met with Sanderson to try to get him to sell the rights to the Cosmere for adaptation, but Apple came out on top with what is being called "The Holy Grail" of deals for authors:
The deal is rare one, coming after a competitive situation which saw Sanderson meet with most of the studio heads in town. It gives the author rarefied control over the screen translations, according to sources. Sanderson will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals. That’s a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoys.
In other words, Sanderson is the alpha and the omega of this adaptation to the screen. He gets to look over everyone's shoulders while it's being written and produced, he gets to have approval over the final product, and he can make what changes he wants to if necessary. If any Hollywood producer steps in with the Kathleen Kennedy approach of "put a chick in it and make her lame and gay," Sanderson can, with all authority, say "That's not going to happen, now sit down."
Apparently, the battle for the Cosmere was competitive between the studios, and I imagine Sanderson was offered somewhere in the range of billions from other streaming services, but the fact that Apple won with this deal tells me that Sanderson was really looking for creative control because he knew how these studios could get. He saw what happened to Game of Thrones, and more importantly, what Amazon did with The Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time. Great stories brought down on the screens by greed and ideological obsession.
And this, to me, gives me great confidence that Apple's adaptation is going to be good.
This creative control aspect isn't exactly new, but it is rare. The last time this happened was when Netflix One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda had control over major steps in the adaptation of his manga into the live-action version on the streaming platform, and to this day, One Piece is one of the few shows on Netflix that hasn't imploded and is actually fun to watch. Even parts that I'm sure Netflix producers hated to adapt, such as Nami finally breaking down and asking Luffy for help, wherein the men in her life go on to handle the business of violence on her behalf, were done faithfully. Nami is allowed to be vulnerable in this scene, not a cookie-cutter girlboss.
As reported by Screen Rant, Oda was very tough on Netflix writers and producers. He would demand reshoots and rewrites because he "wouldn't allow" certain directions they were trying to take his story:
From the earliest stages, he reviewed scripts and demanded revisions. Apparently, Oda was so involved he even pushed for scenes to be reshot. “There were lines I couldn’t allow,” he said. That kind of direct feedback made things tough on the production team, but they listened. The result was a version of One Piece that felt right in tone and spirit. Fans could tell it wasn’t made from a distance. Oda wasn’t just protecting the brand. He was defending the soul of the story.
One Piece's second season is on the horizon, and it's the only show on Netflix getting an additional season that I'm aware of that anyone is excited about.
So we've already seen first-hand what happens when authors get to keep a firm guiding hand on the adaptations. They work. Sanderson, having his hand on the wheel, the gas, and the brake, will have the highest chance of resulting in an actual adaptation that people will enjoy. It won't be turned into a soapbox for some producer's political fixations; it'll be the Cosmere as it should be.
And here's the best part.
If Sanderson manages to pull this off and he creates a series that truly gets people to not only watch in droves, but re-watch again and again, then it will make Apple one of the more prosperous streaming services as more authors trust the platform with their work and more fans run to the platform to see their favorite stories faithfully adapted.
Other networks will be forced to play by those same rules, meaning those producers and DEI committees that had such a kung-fu grip on the industry for well over a decade now will slowly become less and less powerful.
And we would all benefit from that happening.
