Dark One: TV Series, Graphic Novel, Book Series, and Podcast?

Deadline has announced some pretty exciting news today about a story Brandon has been wanting to write for years, Dark One. This story, which has slipped in and out of the Cosmere over the years, is about a young man who instead being the hero prophesied to save the world, is the one destined to destroy it. The last we had heard about it was in last year's State of the Sanderson:

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Dark One

My eternal “like Harry Potter from Voldemort’s viewpoint” fantasy sequence is still hanging out, buzzing at the sides of my brain. I wrote a really spectacular outline for it this summer, one I love quite a bit, and it got both television and graphic novel interest—but these are deals still very much in the works, so I can’t talk about them yet.

I’m pleased with what I have though, and feel this series has moved for the first time in a long while. Note that I did end up pulling it out of the Cosmere, as it ended up working better as a dark secondary world fantasy than it did as a Cosmere YA series. It went both older, and more twisted, in the current outline. Hopefully, by next year’s State of the Sanderson we’ll have something more solid to announce.

Status: Exciting developments in the works!

Well it seems that that interest bore fruit as in their announcement Deadline reveals that not only is there a television series and graphic novel in the works, but there is also a multi-volume book series and a podcast are as well. The tv series is being developed by FreemantleMedia North America with Random House Studio and the graphic novel will be published by Vault Comics. Where the tv series and graphic novel appear to be planned to tell the same story, the book series will expand on it while focusing on secondary characters and the podcast will explore the events leading up to the tv series. Here is the pitch given by Deadline:

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Dark One will be a dramatic fantasy adventure spotlighting a young man who sees visions of strange and fantastical worlds, which he is told are just hallucinations. But this dark and deadly fantasy world that keeps coming to him is actually a real vision of another world – one where he has been prophesied to become a tyrant and destroy this land of interesting creatures, sporadic electrical currents and a darkening landscape.

I for one am always excited to hear about new Brandon projects on the horizon. I know that Brandon's previous foray into graphic novels has been met with mixed opinions, but I'm happy to see that hasn't given up on the medium. Ultimately I'm very interested to see how this story will play out over four different media! Brandon has tried a much more limited version of this before, with Legion (the original plan was for him to write the novellas to tie into a tv series). This however is much more ambitious, but Brandon is also a much bigger deal. There are no dates for anything yet, but I think the future is promising.