Bad news tonight for fans of bestselling fantasy novels which, our spouses assure us, are both very good and get extremely horny ’round about Book 4: The planned Hulu TV adaptation of Sarah J. Maas’ A Court Of Thorns And Roses is not moving forward at the streamer. The series would have been the first original fantasy series for Hulu, adapting Maas’ ridiculously successful tale about a young human woman who finds herself swept up in deadly drama between various courts of High Fae.
The adaptation of the series started cooking several years back, under the auspices of Ronald D. Moore, the Battlestar Galactica rebooter whose most recent major TV success story was taking Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books and transforming them into Starz success. But Moore departed the series back in 2024 after dipping out on his deal with 20th Television, where the show was being developed. (This, in turn, came after rumors began circulating that the TV adaptation might be in trouble.)
Per Deadline, the various Disney-owned entities flirted briefly with trying to find another writer who could translate Maas’ fantasy world to the screen, but have ultimately decided to pull the plug on the project outright. Which honestly feels like leaving money on the table, because Maas pushes paper to an enormous degree: Her own bio lists her lifetime sales as being in the territory of 40 million copies sold (across all her various series), and the 5 current ACOTAR books have sold roughly 20 million all on their own. They’re also some of the most-banned books in American schools at the moment—including going 5 for 5 on school library bans in Utah—which is just as ringing an endorsement, in our books, as the 3.5 million reviews the first book in the series carries on Goodreads.
