Interesting thought: we know now that Taim was originally meant to be Demandred and RJ changed his mind abruptly later on.

For the TV show, would people prefer:

1) Keeping Taim as Demandred and going with the LoC/ACoS depiction of Taim throughout, expose Taim as Demandred dramatically later on and just drop the whole Shara thing.

2) Go with the idea of Taim being a separate character and drop all the oddball references in LoC/ACoS that hinted he was a Forsaken.

3) Adapt the books as they are and just let the TV viewers get confused about it so book readers can explain it to them and feel superior later on.

There's probably quite a few issues that require judgement calls like this to be made.

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1. Harriet's role in WOT was simple: according to RJ she was a beta reader (NOT an editor) Does she hold the rights ot the estate I don't know, but:

Harriet was working for Tom Doherty as an editor until she decided to go back to Charleston. When he founded Tor Books, he got her to agree to continue working for him as a freelancer. In that capacity she edited quite a few early Tor books, most famously Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and the first few Black Company books by Glen Cook. After Robert Jordan (whom Harriet married in 1981) started working on Wheel of Time she gradually moved from editing other work to working on WoT exclusively from the early 1990s onwards.

But Harriet absolutely worked on every single WoT book as a professional editor. She also did beta readings of the material in progress and came up with about half of the chapter titles in the series, as well as coming up with ideas for the chapter icons. She also did some work on the appendix for each book, and coallating some of RJ's notes.

As Robert Jordan's widow and his partner in the Bandersnatch Group, Harriet also pretty much is the Jordan Estate.

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Someone buys it, you publish the deal. All these 'we develop the series/films on the quiet' is baloney.

Not entirely. Companies buy the rights and then keep quiet about it all the time. The GoT deal was done-in-principle in January 2006, so it was a year before it was formally announced. If there are multiple parties involved and one party decides to suddenly hold things up, the other parties cannot proceed without them. I wouldn't be surprised if there was lingering legal issues from the Red Eagle fiasco.

CW could do a fun, lightweight version of WoT: The 100 is a decent show that doesn't hold back on ruthlessness, character deaths or difficult storylines. But it is very much an exception and you'd lose the opportunity to do a decent version of WoT elsewhere.

Based on the negotiations that were underway with Sony, my guess would be that Sony has bought the rights and would be discussing the project with AMC (their partner on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul). Amazon I think would be very interested as they likely want a tentpole fantasy series. Amazon have also had a massive upheaval in the way their shows are bought and operate recently, which has put a lot of projects on hold, which would also go some way to explaining the long delay since there was any news.

  On 12/10/2016 at 10:30 PM, Occams whiskey bottle said:

I have to wonder if Red Eagle Entertainment is still involved somehow because this seems like an oddly long wait after Team Jordans announcement.

I strongly suspect that an agreement was reached where Red Eagle could possibly remain "producers in name only" (with a small slice of any profits made) but with no active involvement in the project, done just to get them to drop the legal action and holding everything up for years. That's pretty common in Hollywood.

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Well, it's only been 6 months. Although we are all very excited about this and want more news there probably isn't much for them to say at this point. Some info on showrunner and writers would be nice and an indication of which direction they are going, as would info on which tv company is involved. It's possible some or all of these are yet to be decided and/or they are waiting for more to be done before making an announcement. That said, some life signs would be great to know the project hasn't just died...

Sure, but there's no reason the company involved couldn't identify itself, unless there was a corporate need not to. They might also be trying to identify a time they can make the announcement for maximum impact.

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Maybe they got a better offer, and right now they are trying to free themselves from the former contract.

Allegedly the rights sale was worth north of $10 million. I consider it unlikely that another production company would sweep in and try to outbid them after the fact, and there'd be contractual clauses preventing that.

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They have to follow this route, because the books are written this way

They won't be adapting the books plot beat for plot beat though. If they did, we'd need 20+ seasons (of 20 episodes per season) and each episode would cost $20 million and there'd be over 2,000 speaking roles. Even a 2-books-per-season, 16-episodes-per-season TV show is going to have to dramatically cut things, probably starting around the midpoint of the series and going onwards. I can see there being maybe 5-6 Aes Sedai named characters of note in Egwene's camp rather than 20+, maybe only half a dozen named Asha'man ever showing up rather than dozens, one or two major nobles per faction versus dozens in the books and so on.

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It would be really good getting some recent informations about the series. 6 months later, and  we don't know anything about it.

It is curious. My guess is that there was some kind of last-minute legal hitch. As far as I know the deal was done, but the company involved has chosen not to announce it yet. There may be issues getting writes/directors/produces of the calibre they need. I also get the impression they haven't gotten an excited, involved showrunner on board and they really need that to move forwards.

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I still wonder if they might make it a story about Egwene and Rand. Their storylines tend to mirror one another.

Thematically, this reinforces the principle male/female dynamic of the books. The first book sets us up to think that the main characters are Rand/Mat/Perrin and Egwene/Nynaeve are support, but when you step back and look at the whole story then it is really Rand and Egwene's stories, with Mat, Perrin, Nynaeve and Elayne as the secondary main characters. RJ plays a bit of bait-and-switch with the reader there. Whether that's because he didn't envisage Egwene being so crucial at the start or he deliberately planned to switch things around, but I think taking the approach of Rand and Egwene being the main POV characters from the start is valid.

You would have to consider some restructuring though. There's long periods in the second half of the series where Rand is doing absolutely nothing of interest (Far Madding was, rather blatantly, late-developed filler material just to give Rand something to do) and there's quite a few periods in the first half where Egwene is off-page doing training montages with the Aes Sedai, Moiraine and the Aiel Wise Ones. You'd have to equalise things a bit.

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You're also talking about a studio/director that turned the Hobbit into 3 movies.

In Jackson's defence, it does appear that he was forced to do this at gunpoint by the studio, who wanted to make as much money as possible. Apparently, after Del Toro walked rather than comply, Jackson suggested he could do the same and the studio said that was fine as they had a bunch of other directors lined up. Zach Snyder's name was thrown around (possibly a little implausibly, as he was already attached to the WB DC movies). Jackson decided to do the project rather than risk something else screwing it up.

That doesn't excuse a lot of the BS he pulled with CG Super Legolas and the pointless long battle with Smaug at the end of the second movie, but I do have some sympathy for the problems he was under.

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To be fair, they could probably make the first 5 books last 1 season each.

 

Later books, like 6,7,8/ 9,10,11/ 12,13,14 could all be one season each.

 

 

That's still 12 seasons, which will not happen.

 

Bad at Math?

That's 8 Seasons.

6-8 = 1 season

9-11 = 1 Season

12-14 = 1 Season

3 Seasons

+ first 5

= 8 Seasons, not 12.

The way you wrote it looked like Books 1-5 = 5 seasons, then a season each for 6, 7, 8/9, 10, 11/12, 13, 14. Your formatting didn't translate well (although I should have realised something was up, as Book 10 certainly would never make for a season by itself!).

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People get this idea stuck in their heads that some books have to be multiple seasons, or require 1 season per book.

The books represent useful story beat points, which work for television as they do for prose. It starts breaking down around Book 6, and then collapses altogether around Book 8 (at which point even RJ struggled to make each book work as a cohesive entity in its own right, and then gave up), but certainly for the earlier books maintaining a season/book relationship is useful. Later on you can go to town on mixing things up.

I've proposed either a simple 2:1 ration (seven seasons, 2 books per season) or an even more ambitious 6 season structure which is 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8/9, 10/11/12 and 13/14. Both require 16-episode seasons to be even remotely viable though. Any less than that and it's time to pull out the scissors and start cutting even more radically than will be required for this structure.

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All the battle descriptions. All the dress, and hair pulling can all be described on screen in seconds over hours.

People said this for Lord of the Rings and they said it for ASoIaF and it never, ever works out like this. The time you save in description you lost again in characterisation (externalising their internal development), exposition and action. Lord of the Rings is far more description-heavy than WoT and it still took an absolute immense amount of time, even when Tolkien spent 3 pages on a description of the Misty Mountains that Jackson solved with an 8-second camera pan.

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We aren't even getting into the idea, that they could craft the seasons to not follow the books on a 1:1 basis, but actually follow the timeline which gets shifted a bit in the later books...

That will certainly be necessary for at least 12 and 13, otherwise the story will stop making sense.

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That would be ridiculous, though. The Shannara Chronicles had a budget of 40 million for its first season (and it still looked terrible). The first season of Game of Thrones got a 60 million dollar budget and that was before anyone knew if a show like that was even viable. After Game of Thrones companies should be willing to invest a good deal more than that since the risk has to be considered significantly lower. If they aren't they shouldn't even bother, frankly, since there is virtually no chance of it succeeding.

$25 million is really not possible. That'd put the show below the budget of most American police procedurals and three-set sitcoms.

Shannara being reasonably successful is useful, because it and Game of Thrones combined show there's legs in a fantasy show. Even more borderline fantasy stuff like The Magicians, historical shows like Outlander, Vikings and The Last Kingdom and even The 100 and Westworld - which may be both SF but with a gritty, period aesthetic - all helps because it shows there's an appetite for more genre stuff in that vein.

Plus Wheel of Time's book sales are absolutely titanic, far higher and with far more readers than ASoIaF had before GoT started. That provides a built-in audience.

On that basis I think it's quite reasonable to expect Wheel of Time to get made (and I'm assured that a deal has been done or just about been done and they're waiting until they've made more progress in securing more talent before making an announcement) and for a major party to be involved. I'm holding out hope it's Netflix or Amazon, as they have both the money and the flexible filming schedules and air times to make it happen the way it needs.

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It's also important to note that nowhere in the books is it directly or clearly acknowledged that Randland is our world in a vastly distant future.  That little tidbit comes only from "word of god" answer to a question that has no relevance or importance to the story whatsoever.  We don't even know how far into the future the Age of Legends is from now, whether there was any apocalyptic event that separates their Age from ours, whether there was an Age between our Age and the AOL, or whether their geography was identical to or even similar to ours.

Ameratsu, Shiva and Kali showing up are kind of a big hint. So is the Mercedes Benz hood ornament, and the giraffe freize, and the aircraft contrails. I agree, the mythological backstory should remain hinted at, but it shouldn't be removed altogether.

I suspect RJ would have included a few more hints if he had lived (he seemed to be going somewhere with the Ogier and the Book of Translation in KoD, but Sanderson never picked up on it), but ultimately it's irrelevant to the main storyline.

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To be fair, they could probably make the first 5 books last 1 season each.

Later books, like 6,7,8/ 9,10,11/ 12,13,14 could all be one season each.

 

That's still 12 seasons, which will not happen.

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One thing everyone has to consider, and is often not really understood, is that the length of the books don't have a set ratio of pages to minutes.

Many chapters are going to translate to mere minutes on screen time, while others will translate to hours.

 

Any chapter in which RJ introduces a location, cast of characters, what outfits they are wearing, what they did that morning before they go on about there day, may take 15+ pages to describe. But on video, that can all be accomplished in under 30 seconds.

 

Dialogue and action scenes are going to take the longest screen time, but conversely, take the fewest pages in the books.

 

Yes and no. There is actually a Hollywood rule of thumb that one page in a traditonal paperback equals 1 minute of screen time. It's why movies of even reasonably-sized books are quite truncated: the average book is around 300 pages long but that's still five hours of screen time. The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy - which is otherwise reasonably faithful - is 11 hours long in its extended version and still leaves a lot of stuff out. A faithful adaptation of the novel would require it to be more like 16-17 hours. The rule works because what you gain in being able to show in a few seconds which might take pages (description, mostly) you lose in dialogue and action scenes. A big problem is that the visual medium cannot effectively show interior character monologues, so an adaptation has to find a way of externalising that character development which also takes up time you might have gained elsewhere.

They can't do a season per book, or if they try it will be a good sign they are not committed to taking the project seriously. There is no way this will last 14 seasons.

I agree a strong budget is required. $10 million+ per episode is a bit ambitious for a new show off the bat, but certainly GoT's starting budget ($6 million per ep) should not be out of the question. It can go up later on if the first season is successful. It's worth bearing in mind that the average budget-per-episode on US TV is still $2 million, with even the CW's superhero shows with lots of effects getting less than $3 million per episode.

As I recall, the Aes Sedai use hand gestures a lot - "throwing" fireballs and so on. The Wise Ones and the damane, IIRC, don't need to do it and are befuddled when they see the Aes Sedai doing it.

  On 9/26/2016 at 3:23 PM, TaiShar337 said:

 

  On 9/23/2016 at 7:12 PM, Werthead said:

A simple POV device. If your POV character in a scene is a channeller, we can see stuff from their viewpoint, complete with colours swirling around and so on. If they're not, then you just see the effects of the weaves, not the weaves themselves.

 

 

 

 I get the POV device, but my concern is more about how to make some of the confrontations between channelers compelling to watch. Take for example, a beautifully choreographed kung fu scene, then compare that to 2 static combatants weaving the one power. You can see the challenge of creating an epic fight scene, to choreograph a dance of weaves to rival Hong Kong Kung Fu cinema, that's what I want        

 

Hmm. It wouldn't work as-is for WoT, but it may be worth checking out Avatar: The Last Airbender, in which the elemental magic (not dissimilar to the One Power) is "cast" by the characters through differing forms of martial arts. We know the Aes Sedai make hand signs when launching fireballs and so on, so there may be some kind of visual cue that can be developed that would work in a similar manner.

  On 9/21/2016 at 6:33 PM, TaiShar337 said:

Script/ screen adaptation is another big concern of mine. GoT season are only 10 episodes long, and that seems to be the going rate on all major series from Netflix, Amazon, USA, AMC etc. The season will have to be longer than 10 episodes right? I realize there' a lot of meat dedicated to detailed descriptions of people, places and concepts that will translate directly into what we see on screen, but there's still a whole lot of story telling as well. 

The maximum number of episodes possible is about 16 (which is what The Walking Dead gets) and I think WoT would need that. You might be able to squeeze it into 14 episode seasons, 12 if you want to be quite ruthless. 10...well, you could get some of the story there, but not all of it and you'd have to cut out a lot of good stuff.

The reason for that is that you really need to do two books per season (for 7 seasons total), so roughly 8 episodes per book. You can move that around a little - The Dragon Reborn, the shortest book in the series, could be done in 6 and The Shadow Rising, the longest book, might need 10 - but that gives you a rough ballpark to be aiming for. With 10-episode seasons, can you really do The Eye of the World or Lord of Chaos justice in just 5 episodes each? It's better than a movie situation, but it's still going to be massively limiting.

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How will weaving the one power be acted out? Remember the battle between Nynaeve and Moghedion in Chachin? At one point during their fierce battle it is said that if anyone had entered the room all they would see is 2 women glaring at each other, hands to their side. As the reader, we know there's in fact a maelstrom of weaves being cut and countered around two critical weaves of spirit, one from each combatant, to shield the other from Saidar. IMO, this is one of the best 1v1 bouts in the whole series, how do you recreate the same intensity in a live action format? When so much of what made that confrontation intense comes from the thoughts racing through Nynaeve's mind?

A simple POV device. If your POV character in a scene is a channeller, we can see stuff from their viewpoint, complete with colours swirling around and so on. If they're not, then you just see the effects of the weaves, not the weaves themselves.

It depends on how you want to go with it. The Aiel being fair-skinned is completely illogical after 3,400 years living in what is effectively a desert, so do you go with RJ's literary description or do you go with what makes more scientific sense and will scan better to an audience? But then you go have to figure in Rand's appearance being unusual in the Two Rivers so some kind of distinctive element is still required. Then you have the somewhat unclear descriptions of Two Rivers folk, with fans apparently generally believing they're fair-skinned Europeans but the descriptions making a lot of references to "dark" colouring and artwork (official and not) being all over the place in depicting them, from quite fair-skinned to quite northern Mediterranean (Italian/Spanish/Greek).

Then you have the issue that you start casting and pretty quickly the homegenity is going to become a limiting factor. You have an awesome actor for Mat and an awesome actress for Egwene, but they're from different ethnic backgrounds. Do you potentially lose an actor for an inferior one for the sake of homegenity or do you just go with the best actors and rationalise it (or just ignore it)? WoT does have the explanation that in the Age of Legends the entire human race in all its creeds and colours had been thrown and mixed together, and then jumbled up in the Breaking, so you can adopt colour-blind casting if you really wanted to. But would that be disrespectful to the books? Or if Robert Jordan was still here would he be laughing his head off and saying it really doesn't matter as long as the actors are the best?

What happens then if the production decides to film in, say, New Zealand for costs? You can fly in the main actors from wherever, but your entire secondary cast on down is going to be pretty much either white or Maori, with very few other options available (Shannara has this situation to deal with). Do you ignore that or rationalise it somehow in the story?

That's why saying, "It's got to be like the books 100%" is highly unrealistic. Depending on budget, filming location and the size of the available acting pool they're going to have to make some changes to that side of things.

I think Amazon would be the canny choice. They've been selling WoT books for 20 years, millions of them, so they know how big the fanbase is. They're also still looking for a killer show that will make people tune in: Man in the High Castle and a couple of their other shows are excellent (and The Tick looks like it could be great) but they haven't got a "killer app" yet and WoT could fill that gap quite nicely. Amazon also have serious financial firepower they can put into the show and would be more likely to fund the longer seasons (16 episodes each minimum, with each season covering two novels) that will be required to do the story justice.

Showtime have been looking for a new big hit for a while now, but my concern with them is that they don't have as much financial muscle as some of the other options. You can't do WoT on the cheap.

I believe those with knowledge of the deal have confirmed that HBO is not the studio involved, and have showed zero interest in any other fantasy property as long as GoT is ongoing. And yes, Westworld is very much the show they are (foolishly, IMO) pinning their hopes on to repeat GoT's success.

The same sources have indicated that the WoT deal was for over $10 million, which is substantial for a book-to-TV deal. To my mind, the only companies realistically in the running to spend that money are Starz, AMC, Showtime, Netflix or Amazon. And I strongly suspect it's the Sony TV deal that was under negotiation before the Winter Dragon/Red Eagle situation blew up.

Yup, the only thing that's happened is that a TV studio has picked up the option. They certainly won't be anywhere near set-building, casting or actual physical production. Why they are now is probably getting a pilot script put together and they'll then look at that and whether they want to exercise the option as a pilot or a full season order.

In terms of announcement, that has to come I believe before pre-production starts (to allow people in the industry to put in job applicatons and so on), but exactly where is up to the studio. The studio could have announced the project months ago, but this delay suggest they want a meatier announcement with more information on the writer and producers. That could come pretty much at any time now.

The books were published over a very, very long period of time (over 20 years). In the UK they had revamped cover styles several times when all the books were updated at once to the same style, but the US publisher seems to have gone for a grab-bag approach of their own covers and borrowing whatever British cover they liked best.

True Detective, Fargo and other shows are getting movie stars, writers and directors to sign on to television because they're one-season anthology shows that shift location, cast and timezone every year. WoT wouldn't be able to do that, of course.

  On 5/24/2016 at 3:50 AM, Rose said:

What do you mean by "if it's going to be a straight series order or going through an initial pilot stage"?

Depending on the network, they may ask for a proof-of-concept pilot episode, one episode to show what the series is going to look like, or they may just order the full first season immediately.

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I'm not sure Peter Jackson would be available. He seems to make movies with very big budgets. I don't know what the budget could be per season for WoT. Maybe something like 50-100 million dollars? Just a guess, so I could be way off...

Jackson's next project is the second and third Tintin movies with Spielberg and the Temeraire TV series he is producing. No interest from him at all in WoT.

Just to reiterate, GRRM will not in a million years be working on this in any way, shape or form. Finishing ASoIaF is the only project he'll be working on for at least the next 5 years and maybe more.

The studio will announce it when they've worked a couple of things out, probably how many episodes, if it's going to be a straight series order or going through an initial pilot stage, and maybe a writer or showrunner announcement. That may be what they're locking down now.

They'll formally announce it a long, long time before casting. And from announcement until you see it on screen, will probably be between two and three years.

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2. Is the director they bring on board a true fan, determined to hold true to the original story? - Based on rumors whose source I won't divulge, we have a good chance that he/she is.

The rumours at the moment are that some well-known fans/webmasters/people may be involved as creative consultants. For a project of this magnitude they will be wanting experienced personnel with lots of TV production experience or a significant track record in writing in Hollywood. I have no doubt there's plenty of scriptwriters around who have read and enjoyed the books.

They will also want to strike a balance between people who know the source material well but aren't precious about it: things will have to be changed, significantly, from the books to the TV screen even if we get 6-7 seasons at 14-16 episodes per season (which I suspect is the absolute maximum we'll get, credibly). If they're looking at 10 or 12-episode seasons, then the story will have to changed a lot more, and having someone who's wedded to the books is not a good idea at that stage.

As this is a TV show, there will be many directors involved over the course of the series. It's more important that the showrunner, producers and writers are more familiar with the source material, at least up to a point.

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Get George R.R. Martin (or his crew) to help with the screenplays.

I don't think George has ever read past The Eye of the World, so that would really not be a good idea.

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George RR Martin is too old to finish his own series.

That's really not true.

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The ones who make game of thrones are in trouble because of their sexism and so on.

No, they're not. Maybe they should be, but their approach has turned GoT into the biggest drama show on TV in the world at the moment, so unfortunately HBO has concluded that this approach works.