Brandon Sanderson’s Hollywood Machine Keeps Growing With New Skyward Adaptation In Development

Tomorrow Studios, the production company behind Netflix’s One Piece, announced Wednesday it has optioned Brandon Sanderson’s Skyward novel series for television adaptation. Sanderson will write the pilot script alongside Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, the husband-and-wife team behind Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Tomorrow Studios CEO Marty Adelstein and President Becky Clements will executive produce alongside Sanderson, Whedon, and Tancharoen.

Sanderson described the deal as “a dream come true,” noting he had been working on the Skyward series for nearly a decade.

The Skyward deal follows the existing Apple TV+ Mistborn adaptation, for which Sanderson has been providing regular weekly video updates on his YouTube channel. In this week’s update, Sanderson confirmed the screenplay is 80% complete, that production will stall for a few weeks while he travels to London for MCM Comic Con appearances, and that he is spending significant time on Hollywood business — something he said he warned his audience about. He also confirmed Ghost Bloods, scheduled for December 2028, needs to be turned in by December 2026, and that he will begin that revision around July.

The weekly update also revealed a new card game, Shards of Creation, developed with Brotherwise Games, featuring canonical art for all 16 Shards of Adonalsium including first-ever reveals of Devotion and Dominion from Elantris. The game goes on pre-order May 22. Meanwhile Sanderson is preparing a speech at Oxford on his London trip and signing appearances at Forbidden Planet.

The machine is enormous. Sanderson has sold more than 50 million books. The 2022 Kickstarter raised $41 million. The Cosmere is expanding into film and television on multiple fronts simultaneously. A Geiger television adaptation through Paramount TV is in development. The leather-bound Eye of the World project continues through Dragonsteel. By any commercial metric, Brandon Sanderson is the most successful independent author in genre fiction today.

What that commercial machinery is funding, and what Sanderson has increasingly traded away to build it, is a different conversation — one Fandom Pulse has covered twice in the past year.

In January 2025, Mormon science fiction author Brad Torgersen publicly called out Sanderson for posting on his website that he hopes the LDS Church will one day revise or set aside the central tenets of the Proclamation on the Family — the church’s foundational statement that marriage is between a man and a woman and that gender is an essential characteristic of eternal identity. Torgersen wrote that following Sanderson’s position would turn the Mormon Church into “just another Woke Jesus club.” Sanderson’s response was a lengthy post defending himself with appeals to nuance and calls to listen to LGBT+ people, which Torgersen and others read as a non-answer that avoided engaging with the doctrinal question directly.

The pattern in Sanderson’s published fiction reflects this trajectory. Gay romance and transgender characters have appeared across his recent Cosmere work in ways that sit in direct tension with the Family Proclamation, which the LDS Church holds as prophetic scripture. As one LDS commentator noted, it is difficult to square including such content with a document that explicitly states marriage between man and woman is ordained of God and that gender is an essential characteristic of individual eternal identity.

Sanderson has not left the LDS Church. He has not publicly renounced his membership or denied his faith. He continues to describe himself as a believing Mormon and maintains his church service. What he has done is carved out an increasingly public position that his fiction will reflect progressive ideology on sexuality and gender regardless of what his church teaches, while using nuance language to avoid the direct confrontation that would clarify exactly where he stands.

The Hollywood deals reward that positioning. The audience that made the $41 million Kickstarter happen skews progressive. The streaming platforms acquiring his adaptations are the same platforms that mandate diversity and inclusion in their productions. The co-writers on Skyward built their careers inside the Marvel television apparatus. Sanderson’s transition from independent Kickstarter author to Hollywood player runs through the same ideological corridors that produced the content FP covers critically every week.

The source material of Skyward is a young adult sci-fi series about a determined female pilot fighting for humanity’s survival. On its own terms it is not a politically weaponized work. But the author assembling the Hollywood infrastructure around his catalog has spent the last two years signaling to the industry that he is a safe pair of hands — safe meaning willing to subordinate his stated religious convictions to the requirements of the marketplace.

The Kickstarter was Brandon Sanderson telling Amazon to go to hell. The Skyward deal with Tomorrow Studios is Brandon Sanderson going back to ask if there is room for him at the table. There was always going to be room. There is always room for someone with 50 million books sold who has demonstrated he will not let his faith get in the way of the deal.

What do you think of Sanderson’s trajectory from Kickstarter independent to Hollywood player? Let us know in the comments.