Rebecca Yarros explains how Fourth Wing transitioned from books to a live-action Amazon Prime Video TV show
"I know that they'll honor the diversity in the cast and we're not gonna see it whitewashed," the author says of the upcoming television adaptation
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It’s not enough for Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean series to conquer the book world; the series, which launched with 2023’s Fourth Wing, is headed to television, thanks to a deal with Amazon’s Prime Video — and at Emerald City Comic Con 2024, Yarros talked about that deal coming together… and how parts of it were a surprise even to her.
“We knew when we were in edits for Fourth Wing [that the publishers] had sent out my first draft… which I didn't know till I was in the meeting. They’re like, ‘that's how it happens,’ and you're like, ‘okay, great. Now I'd like to I'd like to perish completely,’” Yarros joked during her spotlight panel with Popverse’s own Veronica Valencia. “It took off so fast at that at that point; we knew that it was going to have a television series, and we couldn't say anything.”
The original plans to finally announce the show were stymied by what went on in 2023 in the wider entertainment sphere, as it turns out. “We were going to announce the television series on release date and the writers went on strike,” Yarros revealed. So naturally, we're going to support the writer strike and we're gonna keep our mouth shut, so we so we just had to like hold and wait. And all these people were asking me these questions online [about whether or not it would ever be adapted] that I can't answer because it has an adaptation. So I'm just over there, like, ‘I’m gonna be quiet!’ and being quiet and being very, very quiet.”
Calling the process of seeing the series adapted “surreal,” Yarros told the crowd, “’Im really glad that it ended up with Amazon and Outlier Society, which is Michael B. Jordan's production team. They are incredible: They're very protective of the source material. They're absolutely wonderful. They're in constant contact, and I can't say enough great things about them. And they had, they have a great diversity and inclusion rider [in their contracts], so I know that they'll honor the diversity in the cast and we're not gonna see it whitewashed.”
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