'Age Of Legends' Will Bring 'The Wheel Of Time' To The Big Screen, Even As Amazon Makes A TV Series
Sony Pictures Television and Amazon are already teaming up to make a Wheel of Time series based on the massive fantasy saga by author Robert Jordan, but now a movie is also in the works that's set thousands of years before the events of those books and will complement the storylines in the upcoming show. We'll get into the details below, but to put this decision in context, this would be like a studio deciding to make a movie based on George R.R. Martin's Targaryen history Fire and Blood before the first season of Game of Thrones had come out.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Thor and X-Men: First Class co-writer Zack Stentz has been hired to write a movie called Age of Legends, which is based on Jordan's Wheel of Time novels but set "several millennia before the time of the books". This is reportedly the "first of three planned movies based on Robert Jordan's epic world of magic and mysticism," but there's no word yet about where the other two films will fall on the timeline. And strangely, no distributor or studio partner has been listed yet for this first movie. Meanwhile, Amazon is hard at work on the first season of Wheel of Time, a long-awaited TV adaptation of Jordan's fourteen-book series.
"I've been a fan of Robert Jordan's work for many years, and it is especially his allusions to the origins and backstory of The Wheel of Time that I have always found most intriguing," Stentz said in a statement. "I'm excited to be bringing this era Robert Jordan conceptualized to life." After the announcement became public, the screenwriter tweeted:
"My first and last comments on this. Yes, it's happening. Yes, I'm pumped. To fans of the series, I share your love for Jordan's richly imagined world and incredibly detailed world and am going to be working my butt off to do right by it. Stay tuned!"
What is Age of Legends?
THR says Age of Legends takes place "in a futuristic utopia powered by a magical force shared by men and women known as the One Power. When an unspeakable evil is unleashed upon the world and men using the One Power become insane and destroy much of the planet, a small band of women unite under the White Tower and are humanity's last hope of survival."The Wheel of Time series consists of fourteen books that only allude to the events that happened during this Legends time period. A 1997 encyclopedia called The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time contains a section devoted to a historical overview of that period, in which social status was earned not by wealth, but by the amount of service one performed to humankind. I bought the first Wheel of Time book a few years ago and have yet to crack it open, but if you're interested in more information, I encourage you to check out this wiki page.
With this announcement, it's clear that Hollywood is betting that the Robert Jordan Cinematic Universe will be the Next Big Thing. I'm very curious to see if that bet pays off, especially as HBO begins to rev up its next round of Game of Thrones shows.