Earlier this year, Apple and Sanderson announced a new partnership to adapt the Cosmere literary universe, which includes Mistborn. It was also revealed that the bestselling author would be writing the script for the first film.
Now Sanderson has revealed a major pre-production update. In a new video on YouTube, he announced that his first draft of the Mistborn script has hit the 50% mark.
“I’m moving right along on that,” he explained, before adding that he received some “good feedback” from executives at Apple TV “about what they’re expecting.” The studio heads have not read the script yet, but he’s “feeling really good about how this is going.”
“The Misborn screenplay is at 50%. I’m moving right along on that, had some good feedback from chatting with the studio and things like that, with Apple, about what they’re expecting. They haven’t read it yet, but I’m feeling really good about how this is going.”
Sanderson is a bestselling author who has written numerous books over the past 21 years, starting with Elantris in 2005. He began the Mistborn series a year later with The Final Empire and rounded out the trilogy with The Well of Ascension and The Hero of Ages.
Sanderson then continued Mistborn with the Era 2 novels The Hero of Ages, Shadows of Self, The Bands of Mourning and The Lost Metal. There are plans to launch Mistborn Era 3 at some point in the future.
The Mistborn series centers on a gang of thieves that work together, with the help of Allomancy, to try to topple a 1,000-year empire.
Just as Stephen King has famously created an interconnected multiverse that binds together many of his novels, Sanderson has also set many of his series and novels in the same universe, called Cosmere. Mistborn, Elantris, The Stormlight Archive, White Sand and The Sunlit Man are some of his many published stories that take place in Cosmere.
At the moment, Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive are the series currently being considered for adaptations at Apple, with the latter being turned into a TV show.
There have been attempts in the past to adapt Sanderson’s work. Over the past 16 years, two different entertainment companies had optioned Mistborn, but both deals reportedly fell apart, with the author revealing in 2023 that pre-production had been paused.
Over two years later, Apple and Sanderson announced their wide-ranging deal to adapt the latter’s Cosmere universe. It’s unclear if the Mistborn script Sanderson had been working on back in 2020 under the DMG Entertainment deal is what he is continuing to work on now or if he started from scratch.
Sanderson already has experience working on adaptations of fantasy novels after being hired as a consulting producer on Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time, which was based on Robert Jordan’s novels and canceled after three seasons. Sanderson himself co-wrote the final three books in the series after Jordan died in 2007.
Now Sanderson is back working with a streaming service on another fantasy adaptation—his own, this time. It’s still early days in the Mistborn development process, but the author’s new update reveals that his partnership with Apple is smooth sailing so far.