Can Brandon Sanderson Help Apple Break Hollywood’s Fantasy Spell?

Recently, fantasy author Brandon Sanderson announced that he had finished penning the first draft of his Mistborn screenplay. This was big news among his devoted following, because it’s the first on-screen adaptation of his stellar seven-novel Mistborn series. In a worst-case scenario, we’re about to see billions of dollars lit on fire in real time. But in a best-case scenario, this will be looked back on as the point at which the blockbuster hierarchy first began to shift.

Sanderson and Apple have partnered to bring his sprawling Cosmere literary universe to both the big and small screens in one of the most ambitious content plans in recent memory. Not only is it a desperately needed big swing for the subscale Apple, but it’s also an attempt to build new franchises in a new way. 

Hollywood doesn’t have an IP problem; it has a pipeline problem. Anyone paying a lick of attention to Hollywood over the last 15 years knows that established franchises and IP extensions are among the most popular offerings across film and TV. Harry Potter. The Lord of The Rings. Marvel. The Hunger Games. Game of Thrones. The last quarter century birthed new transportive fantasy worlds that transcended their source material to become pop culture pillars. Yet lately, new big-budget hopeful franchise launchers have mostly failed to ignite. Even when a new-to-screen movie is based on popular source material, it can be difficult to migrate fans from one medium to the next. Throw in rising theater costs and endless streaming options, and it’s easy to see why movie ticket sales continue slumping overall. Can Sanderson break the spell?

Sanderson had sold more than 50 million books worldwide as of December 2025. Unlike traditional author-industry dynamics, he carefully built a direct relationship with his audience. As a product of the internet age, he’s been as accessible and engaged as any popular author in recent memory. 

As a testament to his direct-to-consumer relationship-building, Sanderson has raised around $100 million through crowdfunding. This includes a record $42 million from Kickstarter campaigns, used for self-publishing premium deluxe books, producing monthly fan “swag” box bundles and launching tabletop games. On top of all that, he sells out his own fantasy convention every year. His fan passion is very real. 

His social media ecosystem also offers a structural advantage because many of the same users engage with him across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, providing the audience with multiple potential on-ramps. Unsurprisingly, Gen Z (98 percent) and Millennials (58 percent) are the most engaged YouTube users (followed by TikTok and Instagram) and the exact viewers studios try to reach, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. This online presence helped his crowdfunding, which speaks to the enthusiasm of his fans. He’s already done the hardest part in building a new franchise pipeline from scratch. 

Apple isn’t buying books; it’s buying an architect

Apple is granting an unprecedented amount of creative control to Sanderson, who has little experience in film, television and multimedia franchise IP expansion. Per The Hollywood Reporter: “Sanderson will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals. That’s a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling [Harry Potter] or George R.R. Martin [Game of Thrones] enjoys.” 

Only time will tell if this decision is foolish or genius. What we do know is that Apple is making an even more committed bet than Warner Bros. made with Rowling and Martin—that their worlds can yield enduring audience demand. The first two Harry Potter films were still the fourth– and sixth-most-watched general-audience movies in the U.S. last year, according to Nielsen, despite controversy surrounding the author and the decades since their release. The upcoming HBO reboot is guaranteed to be an early viewership sensation as Professor Snape swishes his cape about in dramatic fashion. Meanwhile, the Game of Thrones universe delivered its third breakout hit series earlier this year, and more are on the way. 

The most enduring value comes from building a content catalog that can be mined for years. Those long-running sure-thing franchises are absolutely necessary for healthy studio longevity. They print money across mediums. It isn’t just sequels, it’s merchandise, gaming, streaming retention and beyond. Low marketing lifts because audiences are already in love with the world. But does Sanderson have the ability to engineer a decades-long cross-pollinating media universe à la Marvel’s Kevin Feige? Apple certainly hopes so. 

Apple needs this

Apple’s entertainment division needs a franchise hit more than anyone else. Despite a deep library of acclaimed originals, Apple TV holds only a 10.3 percent platform share among sci-fi movie fans, behind Amazon Prime Video (24.2 percent), Netflix (17.1 percent), Disney+ (11.4 percent) and Hulu (11 percent). This is partially a function of Apple’s small reach. 

As of last year, the streaming service reportedly lost more than $1 billion annually while spending roughly $4.5 billion on content, with just 45 million global subscribers. It’s not even listed among the nine most-watched streamers in U.S. TV Time, per Nielsen’s monthly measurements. 

“Apple could afford to lose money, but they’ve never scaled streaming,” MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson told Puck News. The Cosmere universe—with dozens of novels, interconnected worlds, various tones, time periods, and settings, and ongoing stories—is built to help solve these genre and engagement gaps if it succeeds. (Big if).

Fantasy is a hard nut to crack. Amazon’s Rings of Power cracked Nielsen’s 2022 top 15 series (9.4 billion viewership minutes), but hasn’t returned to a top-10 list since. Netflix’s Wednesday, a young-adult horror-comedy-fantasy retelling of classic IP, is one of the few fantasy franchises that made it to the top titles by global reach in 2025. Solid viewership for Frankenstein and healthy early tracking for Narnia suggest Netflix is maintaining momentum in the fantasy genre across select TV and film titles.

The fantasy ceiling is enormous, while its floor is a deep, dark chasm of costly failures (RIP Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, the Willow TV series, King Arthur: Legend of the Swords, and many others). There are an estimated 1.75 million frequent indie fantasy adult moviegoers in the U.S., per Greenlight. This demo skews younger, urban and multi-cultural. Apple doesn’t need Harry Potter or Game of Thrones level reach. It needs to supercharge a loyal core first and grow from there. That’s been Sanderson’s modus operandi for 20 years.