The Cosmere novels of high fantasy author Brandon Sanderson have been optioned to be adapted into multiple series of films, Variety have reported.
 

The Cosmere is an umbrella term encompassing a number of book series that make up most of Sanderson’s fantasy work. It takes place across numerous worlds, each imbued with different and distinctive systems of magic, all of which ultimately stem from the eons-past shattering of a godlike force, the shards of which brought otherworldly power with them as they were scattered across several planets. DMG Entertainment, who bought the rights to the saga, likened it to a comic book universe rather than a single novel series, possibly in a pre-emptive attempt to draw potentially lucrative parallels between it and the ever-sprawling MCU.

The first to get the adaptation treatment will be The Way of Kings, the initial entry in The Stormlight Archive series. Several interlinking plotlines variously focus on the rise of a soldier after he is betrayed and sold into slavery; a king plagued by visions of the past lives of others as he begins to question the eternal war his nation wages against the enemy who assassinated the last king, his brother; a daughter of a bankrupt noble house who becomes the ward and student of a stern scholar; and a self-loathing assassin bound by oath who hunts and murders numerous high-ranking targets. It’ll be interesting to see how they go about adapting the novel to a single film, as it’s over 1,000 pages long with numerous lengthy battle sequences. Tasked with the responsibility are Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, the writing duo behind Saw IV-VII and Piranha 3DD, which is an intriguing choice as the book is distinctly lacking in intricate death traps or boob-strained bikinis.
 

Also set for immediate adaptation is The Final Empire, the first of Sanderson’s flagship Mistborn saga. Set on a world that has been ruled for a millennium by an immortal dark lord, a teenage street urchin joins a band of thieves who plan to disrupt the overlord’s power base by stealing his supply of a rare and powerful metal, the select distribution of which maintains his control over power-hungry noble families. A scriptwriter for this project is yet to be announced.

Despite the linked nature of the Cosmere novels, reading all the books of each series is not required to understand the events of others, although more recent instalments have begun to make more overt references to the larger mythos, particularly in the second Stormlight novel The Words of Radiance and the latter Mistborn books.