In news that desperately makes us wish we had a metaphor for the cyclical nature of anything readily at hand, Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time series is supposedly making its way back to television sometime in the near future. Having suffered, less than a year ago, the basic indignity of its Prime Video TV show getting cancelled while only like a quarter of the way through its massive, “drop it on a baby and you’d go to jail” source material, the series is now being developed as an animated series by Thomas Vu, a former Riot Games producer who served as an executive producer on the League Of Legends developer’s well-received Netflix series Arcane. Vu actually has a whole slew of plans for Jordan’s books, having partnered with IP holder iwot Studios with an eye toward not just a new animated series, but also an animated film, as well as a video game.
Which leads us, in a spirit of inquiry, to ask a tentative question: How much of this is likely to actually come to pass? Variety notes that none of these listed projects have streamers or distributors attached; all are also listed as “distinct” from a whole other set of Wheel Of Time movies iwot is apparently gearing up to make as part of a (red-flag phrase incoming) transmedia strategy for the franchise as a whole, despite the fact that, again, the brand couldn’t seem to support a single streaming TV show for more than three seasons. Vu and his business partner Anthony Burquez don’t seem to have an animation studio on tap yet, either—there’s no connection to the wider Arcade production apparatus here, in case that wasn’t clear—with the only evidence that anything’s actually in production being a single piece of concept art of series protagonist Rand al’Thor that iwot provided to Variety.
To be clear: We’d love for this to work out, because there’s a lot to love buried within Wheel Of Time, including in the many, many pages of Jordan’s novels that the show never got to. (It even got a pretty decent video game adaptation once upon a time, if you don’t mind having all of Jordan’s politics and drama boiled down to a backdrop for a pretty competently made first-person action game.) There are just a lot of open questions to contemplate here, tied to ambitions of unlikely cultural dominance that have led rights holders on this franchise to some pretty sketchy places in the past. Maybe it’ll defy the trends that seem to strike so many of these projects that start with a massive multimedia push, instead of more focus on a single great idea, and in five years we’ll be laughing about our skepticism; for now, all we can do is report on the intent: Wheel Of Time, back in cartoon form. We’ll have to see where it goes.
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