A Stormlight Archive TV Show Is Finally Happening, but There’s Only 1 Way To Make It Work

A little over a year after the fantasy series’ first arc ended, The Stormlight Archive finally got picked up for a TV adaptation — and there’s only one way to make the show work. Apple TV acquired the rights to the entire Cosmere, with plans to adapt Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive first. Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere is going to be an undertaking, no matter where it starts on-screen. However, The Stormlight Archive is easily one of the most daunting stories to bring to life. Each of its books are more than 1,000 pages.

Looking beyond the sheer length of the series, it boasts a huge scope, weaving lots of different character arcs and storylines together to tell its story. Sanderson’s world is also incredibly detailed, from the rich setting itself to the magic systems featured throughout the five books. Given how massive The Stormlight Archive is, a TV series is the only format that would work for an adaptation. However, I’d go one step further and say that there’s one other condition for making it shine on-screen.

Animation Is the Only Way to Get The Stormlight Archive TV Show Right

A TV format is ideal for The Stormlight Archive, but that’s not all that’s needed to make an adaptation work. If Apple TV is bringing the series to life, it should do so through animation. The rich, vast world-building in Sanderson’s series shouldn’t be downplayed, nor should the epic action sequences — two of which open the very first book, The Way of Kings. Budgetary constraints are a concern when it comes to getting these things right, and while a well-animated series can still be costly to make, it shouldn’t be nearly as bad as live-action. Plus, animation has fewer limits visually, which is a plus for Stormlight‘s Surgebinding and Voidbinding.

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Sanderson even acknowledged the strengths of animation in fantasy, telling Polygon, “There is one excellent [fantasy] show: Arcane.” Of course, he noted that Arcane is a pricy production, but the investment pays off for the Netflix series. It’s a visual marvel, which is precisely what Apple TV should be going for with The Stormlight Archive. And even animated fantasy projects that aren’t quite as ambitious as Arcane are faring better than their live-action competition. Just look at The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein; the latter was the best fantasy show of 2025, speaking to the heights animation can reach when done well.

An Animated Stormlight Archive Series Comes With Its Own Challenges

While animation seems like the only way to capture The Stormlight Archive in all of its glory, embracing this medium would come with its own challenges — the biggest being that it’d be harder to integrate it with the rest of the Cosmere. Unless Apple TV makes the entirety of its new franchise animated, it’s hard to see how Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive would eventually overlap if one was live-action and the other an animated series. Since most fans want to see these projects collide down the line, live-action seems like the most probable path forward. We’ll have to hope it lives up to the heights of animated titles like Arcane. Game of Thrones proves it’s possible, but the live-action fantasy projects that have come out since are cause for concern.

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