It would be an understatement to call Brandon Sanderson a “big deal” in the world of fantasy writing; as the author of the Cosmere universe of books—notably the Mistborn series and The Stormlight Archive, both massive bestsellers—Sanderson is one of the looming monoliths of modern fantasy, with so many fans he can successfully run his own convention just to hold them, and sales that dwarf the vast majority of his contemporaries. And now, Apple’s officially getting into the Brandon Sanderson business.
This is per THR, which reports that Sanderson has not only signed an adaptation deal with the tech giant, but one that grants him unprecedented power: Emerging from a bidding war that saw him talking to most of the major players in Hollywood, Apple has agreed to let Sanderson be “the architect of the universe” it plans to craft from his books Besides sounding like a character from one of his far-flung novels, that lofty titles means that in addition to writing and producing—reportedly on a Mistborn movie and a Stormlight Archive TV show, at least to start—he’ll also have power over approvals, which is the sort of rarely seen authorial control that gets George R.R. Martin writing very cranky blog posts that he inevitably has to delete.
Sanderson’s Cosmere books—the name refers to a wide multiverse of magical realities tied together with shared themes and the occasional Easter egg—have been running since 2005, when he published his first book in the wider series, Elantris. His popularity took off with the first Mistborn book the next year, and then caught some additional heat when the estate of author Robert Jordan selected him to finish Jordan’s Wheel Of Time books in the late 2000s. Since then, Sanderson’s had massive success through both traditional publishing and crowdfunding—a project he launched a few years back in support of “secret novels” he’d written stands as Kickstarter’s most successful publishing campaign ever—most recently with the publication of his latest Stormlight novel, Wind And Truth, back in 2024.
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