The Fourth Wing TV Series Isn’t Making the Same Mistakes As Game Of Thrones—Here’s What We Know

Release date

We don’t have a Fourth Wing TV series release date yet, but author Rebecca Yarros revealed it’ll almost definitely be after the third book, which she’s named Onyx Storm, is released in January 2025. TV shows, take time, after all, and remember this Prime Video adaptation was only announced in October 2023.

Speaking with Variety, Yarros shared some more information on the timeline she’s working towards and assured fans of the books that it would become a Game of Thrones situation where the TV show ended before the books were completed.

“I can promise, unless something happens to me, we’re not going to have that situation. We do have a publication schedule, it is just not public yet. I’ve already said publicly that I’m slowing down slightly, enough that I can put out books and still be healthy,” she said.

“I think I wrote like 851,000 words in 15-18 months — I was just wiped out. I want to be able to deliver the best books possible, so I need to sleep a little. I’ll be writing, I just need to write and sleep, not just write. We’re slowing down a tiny bit, not every six months.”

Cast

When it comes to the Fourth Wing cast, Yarros told Variety in a separate interview that she didn’t mind whether they were established actors or up-and-coming. “I honestly don’t have an opinion on it. I’ve never done this before, so I don’t have an opinion on if they should be established or if they shouldn’t, or what attention that brings, because I’m out of my depth of knowledge here,” she said.

“I’m going to trust that they bring in the right people when they start casting. And then I’m gonna hope that they fit who’s described in the book, and I think we’ll know when we know. But I honestly don’t have a preference, just whoever can fit the character.”

And, for the record, Xaden is not white. “We’re just going to say he’s POC, we’re just going to leave it at that. I didn’t rise to the bait of a lot of those posts, which I think probably got me some flack, but I knew we were already in development for TV, and I want to make sure that role is open to as much diversity as possible,” she said.

The plot

Fourth Wing is about Violet Sorrengail, a 20-year-old who is forced by her mother to attend Basgiath War College in the fictional country of Navarre to become a dragon rider. Violet had trained her whole life to become a scribe—one who documents history—but her mother, a general and the college’s commander, makes her join the Rider Quadrant instead. We don’t know how faithful the show will be to the books but we assume it’ll be the same premise.

What some fans are worried about is the sheer volume of dragons will be very expensive to create in CGI. “What I’m curious about is how exactly they will deal with so so many dragons and wyverns? It must cost a ton of money,” wrote one fan on Reddit. Game of Thrones, after all, was set in a world where dragons were close to extinction and only had one, maybe two, dragons depicted on screen at the one time. By the finale season, it was costing MAX (then HBO) $15 million per episode.

Conversely, Yarros’ universe revolves heavily around dragons, sometimes in their thousands during battle scenes which will be, quite frankly, a nightmare to animate in a cost-effective way. Another speculated: “I do feel like there would have to be a huge budget behind that but I’m sure they’ll focus on one maybe 2 dragons at a time during each shot probably not a bunch of them at once.”

How many seasons will there be?

We don’t know how many seasons of the Fourth Wing TV series but we can assume it’ll be a book per season, and Yarros has confirmed her original trilogy will now be a five-book epic. “Probably about 30,000 words in [to Iron Flame], I called my editor and I said, ‘I think this is a five-book series.’ And that’s how we went from three to five,” she told Variety.

Writers and producers

Amazon and Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society scored the rights to Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, and the three remaining planned books in Yarros’ Fourth Wing universe, The Empyrean book series. Yarros will serve as a non-writing executive producer on the series alongside Liz Pelletier for Entangled Publishing. Liz Raposo is executive producing for Outlier.

Where will it stream?

The Fourth Wing TV series is being created by Amazon, so the series will premiere on Prime Video.

Showrunner

 Anne With an E creator and Breaking Bad writer Moira Walley-Beckett was announced as showrunner on July 22, 2024.