Brandon Sanderson
Part Six: Hollywood and Video Games
An Explanation
To make conversations around film/television a little easier for you, I’m going to give a kind of rough list of steps it takes to get something made in Hollywood. It’s my intention to use this explanation in future years, so you can gauge movement on various properties—without expecting too much. If I say “this property is in Phase One,” you’ll know what I mean.
Often you’ll hear in the news “Such and such property is being developed for film!” You’ll get excited, then hear no news for years. That is because, despite what the news cycle (generating clicks with hype) would have you think, “Being developed for film” is one of the EARLY steps, not one of the later ones. Here is a rough list of events. This is simplified, and does not include many corner cases that experts could explain to you in better detail. This is also from the perspective of a rights holder, not a screenwriter, producer, or director—for whom the early steps are often different.
Phase One: Initial Option
Step One: Pitching
Many properties skip this step. It’s what it sounds like: you go to Hollywood with a property, and pitch it around. This can also happen later, if you put together more of a package yourself, with people attached. (See below.)
Step Two: Interest
This is where someone (usually a production company) in Hollywood comes to you and wants to explore picking up the rights. The reason step one is often skipped is because if a book series is doing well, you don’t often have to go pitch it. Sometimes, this interest is in the author, rather than the property. I’ve had tons of meetings where they just want to feel me out as a creator.
Step Three: Option
This is where the announcement often happens in the press that gets people excited, though it’s still very early on—and in the “easier” steps. That said, it can take months or years to go from interest to option, as a lot of people investigate, then decide not to make an offer.
An option is like “renting” film/tv rights from an author. The studio pays money every year or so to keep the rights from being sold to someone else, with a big payout to come if they actually make the thing. The author gets some stable income off of their property, with a promise of more. The production company gets to know nobody else is going to snipe the property out from underneath them while they go through the very difficult next steps.
The option contract is usually a very long document spelling out just how the production company can proceed to get the full rights (buy them) at any time during the option period, which is often around five years. These are often independent producers looking to build a package out of a property, then sell it to one of the big players (a studio or streamer) with the producers remaining in an important decision-making position through the course of the production, where they will make their option money (and then some) back on their salaries and fees as producers on the property.
Once in a while, a studio or streamer themselves makes the option—and this is usually called a “studio deal.” This can skip some steps below, but not always, as these days studios often develop properties just as if they were independent producers, then shop them both to other arms of the studio and to places outside the studio. Sometimes there can be multiple phases of optioning, buying, and studio involvement.
(An example of this is the Wheel of Time. Originally optioned by Red Eagle, an independent pair of producers. Then eventually set up at Sony, who developed for a while before selling it to (or maybe partnering with? I don’t have all the details) Amazon, who eventually bankrolled and released the show.)
Phase Two: Development
Though I’m going to list a typical order for this next phase, know that everything in this list can happen really in any order, and I’ve seen it go in all sorts of ways.
Step Four: Script
Often, at this point, the script is commissioned for films. Once in a while it is done earlier (for example, if an author is trying to act more like a producer, they might write or commission a script and take it to pitches). However, usually this only happens once the rights are locked up.
For a television show, this is where you bring on your “showrunner” who is part screenwriter, part manager of a group of screenwriters. They’ll be the one to hire, and help the directors, for each episode, run the writer’s room, and generally be the head of production for a show. For a film, landing a director is usually a later step, and right now just a screenplay is commissioned.
The hunt for the right screenwriter can take a long time—months and months—and the writing of the first draft of the script can take a long while as well. Once it’s in, there are often revision phases, where the script is worked on, or rewriters are brought in. In my experience, this is one of the big moments where development dies—a script comes in, and it isn’t liked enough by either the production company or the author. Or the revisions go nowhere. Or whatever. I’ve had optioned books sit in the script stage for years.
Television works similarly, except they’re looking for a treatment (in this case, a kind of story bible for the series, with a breakdown of episodes) and maybe a script for the pilot.
Step Five: Attachment
Once a script is done (sometimes before on big properties), the producers will try to get some kind of big name attached. A lead star or two, or an interested director with enough of a name to get people at studios/streamers to pay attention. A project can at this point also pick up much larger names who are producers, people who see the potential and help elevate the property to a higher level of meetings and pitches. This is, yes, why you often see so many production company names at the start of films. (Another is that the directors/actors sometimes have their own production companies who get involved.)
Step Six: Studio Signs On
Sometimes before the actor/director is involved, sometimes after, you will finally land the attention of a studio or streamer. They have the big pockets, and most production companies do not have the money (let alone the platform) to create a full-blown film or television show. In our current environment, for big-budget things, as my films or shows would have to be, you need a studio or a streaming platform.
With the right package, script, and pitch you can get the studio to jump in and start bankrolling the thing. That said, once they get involved, they often start changing things structurally. (See the next part.)
Step Seven: Studio Development
If you’re lucky, you’ll land a production deal after all this work—that means the studio will begin providing funding and a greenlight will happen quickly. Usually that doesn’t happen, and you do further development.
If you don’t have a production deal, what’s going to happen is the studio is going to review the script and ask for rewrites—or toss it out and commission a new one. If you’re so lucky as to have an actor or director attached, they’ll probably stay attached, but there will be work to get the missing pieces filled in. (There will still be many of those even if you have a big name attached.) This is the studio development phase. During this phase, for television, a pilot might be ordered and filmed—though sometimes these don’t use the final cast.
You can see that there are still some big hurdles ahead, which is why you shouldn’t hold your breath on any announcements.
Phase Three: Production
Step Eight: Final Approvals
You might think we’re there, but we aren’t. Because there are a few hoops to jump through. First, at this point (if not before—these days, it’s often before) the studio or producer “exercise their option” to buy the property, and pay that big lump sum contained in the original contract, meaning they get to own the property for film and television. Usually this is for a five-year period—during which, if they put out a film or show, the five-year period resets. This allows them to keep the rights in perpetuity, so long as they are making things with those rights.
Then you show it all to the people at the top. They’ll watch the pilot for a show or review the script and the attached people for a film. You all hold your breath and hope for final approval. This is usually called a “greenlight,” and for a television show involves a “series order” of a certain number of episodes. A budget is signed off on, and everything is a go.
I’ve never had one of my properties get past this stage, unless you count the Wheel of Time. I’ve had a few get very close, but nothing has been able to overcome this hurdle—and it seems that the vast majority of things that even get to this stage die right here.
Step Nine: Greenlight
You are a go. You make the thing and spend the budget. This is obviously a very hard step, but I’m not going to write much about it here because at this point, what you know about the process is largely true. A lot of featurettes and bonus behind-the-scenes looks talk about this process.
Usually, when you hear this step has happened, you can start celebrating and expecting to be able to see a property turn up on the screen. If I were you, this is where I’d let myself get excited, and not before. As we’ve seen in several high-profile cases recently, though, even this isn’t a guarantee the show or film will be released. Sometimes, it turns out poorly enough that they shelve it rather than release it.
Step Ten: Release
If this all goes well, then you finally have something released.
So, for future years, this is our list, with the acknowledgment that some of these steps can happen out of order.
-
Step One: Pitch
-
Step Two: Interest
-
Step Three: Option
-
Step Four: Script
-
Step Five: Attachments
-
Step Six: Studio Signs On
-
Step Seven: Studio Development
-
Step Eight: Final Approvals
-
Step Nine: Production
-
Step Ten: Release
My Properties Right Now
Snapshot: Is in Studio Development for television, so actually quite far along. (In Step Seven.)
Skyward: Has been optioned for television, and is looking for a showrunner. (In Step Four.)
Tress of the Emerald Sea: After going and doing pitches all this year, we are in the later interest stage for an animated television show, with maybe an offer of an option coming soon. (So in Step Two.)
Mistborn: Is at Step Zero right now, though recently it got as close as Step Six/Seven as a live-action film. (It’s tricky to point to where it got because this project did a lot more internal development than is usual—so it had basically done all of Step Seven before going out to pitch to studios. It got offers of development deals from studios, but no production deal, and the partners I had did not want to go back to script after all the work they did.
As the studio didn’t want to do it the way the producers did, it died at the end of Step Six. If it had gone as we wanted, we would have skipped Step Seven and Eight entirely, as the production deal would have included a greenlight. We then would have gone straight to Step Nine—which was why I was so hopeful I could do an announcement for you. Alas, it did not happen. (Yes, this means stars were attached. No, Henry C. was not one of them. Yes, you’d recognize some of the names. No, I can’t tell them to you.)
That’s everything, I’m afraid. I’ve said no to several offers on Cosmere properties over the last five years, as I was all-in on getting the Mistborn film made. Now that that has fallen through, I’m back to square one, basically, on the Cosmere.
I do hold the rights currently for everything except Skyward and Snapshot. I hope to be able to announce the creative teams involved with those two for you soon enough—but I’ve learned that building hype before we have too much progress is counterproductive, so let’s keep our expectations tempered for now.
