Questioner
Do you have plans to self-produce your books into movies or TV shows? If Taylor Swift can do it, you can.
Brandon Sanderson
Oh right, yeah, Taylor Swift. Let's point out, there's a little bit of a difference between a 45 million dollar Kickstarter and a 1.6 billion dollar tour. So, we've talked about this, and I've come to the conclusion that for right now I don't want to try it. There are a couple of reasons for this.
Reason number one is that I like my Kickstarters to have a ton of value in them, right? I always tell my team, I'm like, we have to be giving a lot of value to people on the stuff that they do with our crowdfunding or our Kickstarters. And that means that, of that 45 million dollars, we don't make a lot of that. We're putting most of that into the product, and into the shipping, and into the team, and into the company. And so, if we were to do a crowdfunded movie, we need like a 200 million dollar budget, 150 at the lowest, to do a film. And if I'm going to do that, I would want to be giving people a ton of value which means we'd probably have to raise 450 million, which is just a ridiculous amount to do on a crowdfunding, right? So that's number one.
Number two is, a lot of times, these sort of outsider projects don't work as well in Hollywood as you would hope they would. Taylor Swift was able to do a thing and put it directly in the theaters and whatnot, but what we want is a partner over a long period of time. I want someone like Universal, or Disney, or Warner Brothers, who has a long established reputation to buy in on the cosmere, and make things with me for twenty years, right? I don't want to just do one off, I want to build something over time and I feel like I need a really good partner in the industry to do that.
And you know, reason number three is, a fool and their money is soon parted. I've known too many people who think, yeah I can make a movie. And let's just say that there's a reason why The Room isn't that great, and it's because being good in one area doesn't mean you're good in another. I am really good at narrative. I'm getting good at screenplays, right? I'm getting to the point where I feel confident I could do the screenplays myself. But I can't direct, I can't cinematographize, I don't even know how to make that a verb, right? I can't do casting, I can't do all of these things that experts in their field, and yes, I could start hiring them, but I feel like, never having run a movie before, it would just be a disaster. So you would donate all this money, I would waste it all, because I wouldn't know what I'm doing, and this is how Kickstarters go bad real fast, right? I've only done these things when I know I can deliver, and I do not know I can deliver this for you.
So, for the mean time, I'm going to keep trying to use the standard mechanisms. I feel like, you know like, this year we got frighteningly close. Well, frightening is the wrong term. The frightening part is it didn't work out. But we got really, really close. I saw people on stage, in mistcloaks, acting and reading my lines, okay? Yeah. And then it all fell apart, and it's all dead, right? We got really close, but we're getting closer and closer. And Hollywood is really interested in the Cosmere. They recognize the value of my stories. They've been, for years, saying, we know this is going to come, break out, and it's going to be big someday. But it's all about figuring out how to make it work, and beyond that, Hollywood is kind of on fire right now. And so we're waiting for it to, for someone to put it out. So, regardless, the answer is, I've considered it, and I've discarded it for those reasons, but it's still possibly on the table. It is something that, you know, the awareness of the possibility is in the back of my mind, okay?
