Amazon's Wheel of Time Series Reportedly Wraps Filming

Amazon's highly anticipated The Wheel of Time TV series may have finally wrapped up after a veritable roller coaster of a production schedule. WOTSeries.com, an unofficial fan site, brings word that the series has seemingly wrapped production as their sources reported "social media posts of key crew members celebrating the completion of the first season." Filming on the fantasy adaptation first began in September of 2019 and like almost everything else on Earth was forced to postpone in March of 2020 due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Production resumed in the later part of the year but saw another unexpected shut down in the fall.

The Wheel of Time is an adaptation of the book series by the same name, written by Robert Jordan and finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's death. The series features a group of young adults caught up in a grand prophecy involving the Dragon, a reincarnated champion of Light who will also bring about the supposed Breaking of the World. The world of Wheel of Time is fantastically diverse and complicated, rivalling the size and complexity of worlds in other series like A Song of Ice and Fire or Lord of the Rings. While not as well known in mainstream circles, The Wheel of Time is considered a seminal work of fantasy by many. Several studios have attempted a live action adaptation of Wheel of Time (including a controversial pilot episode that aired on FX in the middle of the night), but Amazon's is the first to make it to a full series commitment.

Rafe Judkins, showrunner for the series, previously confirmed that the shutdowns in production were beneficial for the producers as it gave them time to refine the first season and even being breaking the story for the second (assuming Amazon eventually renewes the series). Judkins offered a lot of details during JordanCONline last year as well, specifically how they manage making changes to the source material in the adaptation.

"If my job is to protect the spine and the heart of what's there, sometimes that is changing things," Judkins said (H/T WinterIsComing.net) "Because sometimes if you did them exactly as they were, a new audience to it wouldn't actually understand the heart of what's there because a lot of it is expressed inside someone's head or it's expressed by a character that gets a POV that we can't really do on television. It's those kind of things. You know a huge cast member coming for one scene and then not appearing for three books later causes all sorts of logistical problems.

The cast for Wheel of Time includes Rosamund Pike as Moiraine, Josha Stradowski as Ran al'Thor, Marcus Rutherford as Perrin Aybara, Zoe Robins as Nynaeve al'Meara, Barney Harris as Mat Cauthon, Madeline Madden as Egwene al'Vere, Daniel Henney as Lan Mandragoran, and Michael McElhatton as Tam al'Thor.

No release date for Wheel of Time has been announced yet.