Adaptations, made and unmade

The first deal came early. On 11 January 2010, with the first trilogy finished and The Alloy of Law nearly two years away, Sanderson announced that he had optioned the film rights to Paloppa Pictures. Nothing reached a camera. In early 2014 he posted that the option had lapsed, thanked the company warmly and gave no reason; the rights, he wrote, were available again.

In October 2016 the stakes rose. DMG Entertainment, founded by Dan Mintz, took the film and licensing rights to the whole Cosmere, and Variety reported that it had committed $270 million to cover half the cost of the first three films. The Way of Kings was to go first, with The Final Empire adapted alongside it, and in January 2017 Deadline reported that DMG had hired the screenwriter F. Scott Frazier to adapt the first Mistborn novel, with Mintz producing and Sanderson and Joshua Bilmes as executive producers. Again no film followed. In a Brigham Young University writing lecture posted in March 2020, Sanderson said that he was currently writing the screenplay of The Final Empire.

In December 2022 he wrote that Hollywood things were moving well for the first time in his life. A year later the film had run into hiccups and was on pause, and in his State of the Sanderson of 19 December 2024 he explained how it died. The producers he had partnered with had developed the project much further than usual before taking it to the studios. Stars were attached, names readers would recognize but that he could not share, though he did answer the fan-casting perennial: “No, Henry C. was not one of them.” The package drew offers of development deals but no production deal. The studio wanted the film made differently, the producers would not go back to the script, and so:

it died at the end of Step Six

The steps are his own. In the same post he set out a ladder of ten, from the pitch through interest, option, script, attachments, the studio signing on (step six), studio development and final approvals to the green light and release, and told readers to let themselves get excited at the green light and not before. For five years he had said no to several offers on other Cosmere properties, all in on this one film; now Mistborn was back at the bottom of the ladder. The post names neither the producers nor the studio. It did note that he held the screen rights to all of his books except Skyward and Snapshot, so the Cosmere was his to offer again.

This time Sanderson did the selling himself. In May 2025 he pitched Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive to the major streamers and studios. In July, on a panel at the Celsius 232 festival in Spain, he said he wanted a really good Mistborn film, on one condition: that he write the screenplay and control the story. By December he had several offers, and he placed Mistborn and Stormlight together at a very early step four, the script.

On 28 January 2026 The Hollywood Reporter broke the result: Apple TV had closed what was described as an unprecedented deal for the Cosmere, with the Mistborn books eyed for feature films and Stormlight for television. Sanderson will write, produce and consult and will have approvals, later reported to include casting: a level of involvement, THR said, that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoys. Explaining the choice on YouTube a week later, he said it was “less about control and more about the partnership”; he liked Apple’s careful rollout of specific films, warned that the formats could still change, and said that nobody was attached and the films would not come the next year. The books would not slip for it: the first Ghostbloods novel was still on time for 2028.

Then he wrote, reporting his progress by the percent: half done at the end of March, 91 percent by the book’s twentieth anniversary in July. On 28 July he posted that “the first draft of the Mistborn screenplay is DONE!”, timed to celebrate the July 2006 publication of The Final Empire, the book the first film adapts. He called it an early step in a very long process, and the process has gone the way he warned. In August he was gathering feedback, with many drafts to come. In September he told IGN that the film was still many years off: after the revisions comes the hunt for a director, “probably the single most important decision”; filming, he imagines, is a few years away, and the visual effects after it can take a good eighteen months or more.

In an interview at FanX in Salt Lake City, published by CBR on 3 October, he said he had turned in the draft (secretly a second draft, after revisions of his own), that Apple had read it and sent notes, and that his job now was revisions. He is writing the Mistborn script alone (for Stormlight he expects a writing partner), and describes his role under the contract in terms of Marvel’s Kevin Feige: shepherding the whole Cosmere. On 11 October ScreenRant, drawing on an interview he gave Collider, reported him describing what the script has to balance: a heist, a My Fair Lady and an epic fantasy in one film.

On 19 October 2026 his homepage shows a “Mistborn Screenplay 2.0 Draft” at 10 percent, and his Film and TV News page still leads with the July post. There is no director, no cast, no green light and no release date, and he has said it would be unrealistic to expect the film in 2027.

The first Mistborn anyone could play was going to be Mistborn: Birthright. Little Orbit announced it in March 2012 for the autumn of 2013: a prequel with an original story by Sanderson, who was writing all of it and most of the dialogue, about Fendin Fathvell, a young man of a noble family learning his Allomantic powers to save that family. It slipped to 2015 to move to the next generation of consoles, then to the autumn of 2016.

As Little Orbit’s Matthew Scott later told it, a vertical slice was shown at E3 in 2012; then partners and funding shifted, and in 2014 a possible deal with High Voltage Studios inspired plans for an open-world game with physics-based Allomancy. Then two retail distributors went out of business, took large chunks of Little Orbit’s revenue with them, and nearly bankrupted the company. Sanderson called the game dead in November 2016. Scott made the cancellation official on 24 July 2017, handed the rights back, and wrote that rather than hold on to them, “I’d like to see someone else make the amazing Mistborn game”.

In October 2018 Sanderson said on Reddit that he would love to work with CD Projekt Red and would seriously consider giving them the rights for free; nothing came of it. By his account the game rights then spent six or seven years tied up with the film rights. In December 2025 he said he had begun talking to big-budget studios, at step one only, and meant to keep control of his video game rights this time. No studio has been named.

The one that was is a cameo. On 27 May 2021 Kelsier arrived in Fortnite’s Item Shop. Sanderson had worked with Epic’s Donald Mustard before, on the Infinity Blade novellas. The set made the Survivor of Hathsin a cloaked assassin with a volcanic-glass dagger, in his black attire or a masked white undercover variant, with Hemalurgic spikes for back bling and a Kelsier loading screen. The man who spends The Final Empire teaching the skaa that they can fight back became a costume anyone could wear into someone else’s battle.

The tables got there long before any screen. Sanderson announced a partnership with Crafty Games in early 2009, and after delays Crafty published the Mistborn Adventure Game in December 2011: a pen-and-paper role-playing game in which players can be noble or skaa, roll pools of two to ten six-sided dice, and use Allomancy, Feruchemy and Hemalurgy among their powers. Sanderson’s short story “The Eleventh Metal” first appeared with it. Supplements followed until 2023: Terris: Wrought of Copper and an Alloy of Law book for Era Two (both 2014, the second carrying another new story, “Allomancer Jak and the Pits of Eltania”), Skaa: Tin & Ash (2015), Masks of the Past for the next two Wax and Wayne novels (2017), and a last book on the noble houses, Nobles: The Golden Mandate (2023).

In 2016 a Kickstarter funded Mistborn: House War, designed by Kevin Wilson and developed by Crafty: the first official board game set in the world, in which players lead the great noble houses trying to weather the events of the first novel. It shipped to backers from August 2017, and its expansion, The Siege of Luthadel, makes the players factions attacking or defending the city during the second.

A bigger hit came from Brotherwise Games, working with Sanderson’s company Dragonsteel. Mistborn: The Deckbuilding Game, designed by John D Clair and announced in November 2023, sends Era One characters into Allomantic battles in which burning metals power the cards. It came out in October 2024, sold through its first two printings at once and topped BoardGameGeek’s Hotness list; Wirecutter liked it but found it more complex than Dominion, not a game for beginners. Its expansion, The Well of Ascension, adds alloy cards, new metals and solo and co-operative modes set in the siege of Luthadel, and reaches shops on 18 November 2026.

The Cosmere Roleplaying Game from Brotherwise and Dragonsteel, whose Kickstarter of September 2024 became the biggest game Kickstarter ever by the count in Sanderson’s 2024 year-end report, put Stormlight first. The Mistborn books are arriving this autumn: digital editions came on 2 September 2026 for backers and 9 September for everyone, and in print a Welcome to Scadriel starter follows on 21 October and the Mistborn Handbook, the Mistborn World Guide and the campaign Mistborn Legacy on 4 November. The handbook has thirty-four metallic arts, kandra and koloss-blooded heroes, firearms and Hemalurgy, and Mistborn Legacy runs across both eras, so that choices made in Era One echo in Era Two.

The saga has had one voice since 2008. Michael Kramer reads the unabridged audiobooks for Macmillan Audio: The Hero of Ages came out in audio in October 2008, on the day the book was published, and The Final Empire and The Well of Ascension followed that December. Each Wax and Wayne novel since has come out in audio on the same day as in print, read by Kramer, through The Lost Metal in 2022; SFFaudio’s reviewer singled out his Breeze.

Then GraphicAudio, which sells its productions as movies in your mind, turned the books into full-cast dramas with music and sound effects, recorded with the permission of Sanderson and Dragonsteel and all directed and adapted by Nathanial Perry. The first part of The Final Empire came out on 1 December 2013 with a cast of twenty-five and about six hours of drama; the trilogy ran to nine parts by April 2015, and the dramatized Final Empire was a finalist for the 2015 Audie Award for audio drama. The first three Wax and Wayne novels followed in 2016, Secret History in 2018 together with the two short stories from the role-playing books, and The Lost Metal in two parts from December 2022 to January 2023. Sanderson describes them as nearly unabridged.

So, twenty years in, Mistborn can be heard in one voice or in twenty-five, played with dice and cards, worn as a skin and read in leather. It cannot yet be watched. The ladder, as Sanderson tells it, has ten steps, and the film is waiting on a writer working through the studio’s notes.