Dear Gossips,

Welcome back to those of us in Canada after the long weekend. I was probably as offline as I’ll ever be these last few days, restricting screen time for long stretches so now that I’m just getting back into it, making a feeble attempt to get through emails, the one I pretty much opened first was Puck’s latest newsletter because of one word in the subject line: Romantasy.

I don’t read a lot of romantasy, but I’m well aware that it does big business. Romance, in general, is big business in publishing and now on streaming, given the success of Bridgerton, Heated Rivalry, Heartstopper, and of course Jenny Han’s library: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and The Summer I Turned Pretty. Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Elle Kennedy’s Off-Campus series premiered last week to strong reviews and all kinds of viral activity over the weekend. And the Emily Henry timeline just kicked off a few months ago with People We Meet on Vacation on Netflix, with Beach Read going into production this summer.

Romantasy, however, is on a whole other level, and Julia Alexander’s latest piece about “Streaming TV’s Romantasy Problem” explains one of the major obstacles: dragons need more money, presenting a higher degree of difficulty where adaptation is concerned because of the intricate world-building that happens in the books.

We’re talking about this now because at their Upfront last week, Amazon confirmed that they’ve greenlit Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing. I don’t read a lot of romantasy but I f-cked hard with Fourth Wing last year because Kathleen wouldn’t stop pestering me to read it and I powered through the three released books in the series (so far) in a week. It had already been announced over a year ago that an adaptation was in development, with Michael B Jordan’s production company attached. The script is now ready, and obviously they’re confident enough to proceed because it’s a full series order with MBJ joined by showrunner Meredith Averill, along with the author, and also co-executive producer Lisa Joy, at the event.

The likes on that post should tell you how popular and invested the readers are in this story. Lisa Joy’s name might not be super familiar to you but you know her work because she was the co-showrunner on Westworld and she’s directing the first episode of Fourth Wing. And she’s biracial, so with her involvement, in addition to MBJ, and the fact that Rebecca Yarros has explicitly stated that Xaden is a person of colour, I want to be optimistic about casting and the actors who will represent these fictional characters in this fictional world – and the stress here is on “fiction” because, well, you know the f-ckassness that happens when books become movies or TV shows and people get territorial about who they saw in which roles.

Xaden Riorson is the male lead in Fourth Wing, already lusted over on the page and there’s been non-stop speculation about who could play him. Interestingly, Josh Heuston, who stars as Justin in Prime Video’s Off-Campus, has long been suggested by fans to be a candidate. And he was asked straight up about it (again) at the premiere last week.

@people #FourthWing casting directors— you know what to do. 😌 #JoshHeuston played it very coy when asked at Amazon Upfront about fans wanting him to play #Xaden. 👀 #OffCampus #BookTok ♬ original sound - People Magazine

Back to the dragon problem though – dragons are so important in this universe: they are bonded to their humans, and a huge part of the first book has to do with them training to be fighters and finding the dragons they will ride into battle on. The dragons have distinct personalities and significantly influence the plot so it’s not like Game of Thrones where you can go several episodes without seeing a dragon. The dragons show up all the f-cking time on the imaginary continent where Fourth Wing is set. And Julia Alexander’s point in her piece at Puck is that the cost of producing a series with so many dragons that have to look realistic, whose thoughts we hear all the time, will be one of the most formidable challenges for this adaptation. Which is one of the reasons why previous romantasy adaptations haven’t been as successful, without the big payoff of a show like Game of Thrones. Can Fourth Wing change all that? Michael B Jordan IS on a roll. And this project is obviously a big priority for him, given his presence at the Amazon Upfront and the years he and his team have spent in development.

The soonest the show will premiere is probably 2028, so there’s time but, like, not that much time. Filming will be months, perhaps the better part of a year. And post-production will be months too…because dragons. Presumably, then, shooting will begin by next year, and we’re already almost halfway through this year (FML), so we should hear about casting in the next few months? Perhaps by the fall? That, to me, feels like a realistic timeline.

Yours in gossip,

Lainey

Photo credits: Faye's Vision/Cover Images/Instar Images

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