Wheel stop

Add another one up to the list of canceled-before-their-time shows: Prime Video has canceled its big epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time. Word comes via Deadline, which notes that while the studio's executives were pleased with the show, the reasons came down to the "current economic environment," which is to say: it was an expensive show produced during an uncertain time.

The series was based on the book series by the late Robert Jordan, a staple of 1990s sprawling doorstop novels (15 of them published prior to his death, with three others co-written by Brandon Sanderson) that followed a farm boy who learned that he was the prophesized Dragon Reborn and that it's his destiny to save the world from evil. There had been a whole bunch of attempts to adapt the series over the years (including a low-budget pilot in 2015 designed to allow a studio to hold onto the rights) before Jordan's widow announced that they were working on a series in 2016.

That adaptation eventually made its way to Amazon's Prime Video, and the first season debuted in November 2021, a year before Prime Video's other big-name epic fantasy series, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power arrived. The series was picked up through a third season. Deadline notes that there were "lengthy deliberations" after that third and last season concluded in April, and ultimately, Amazon opted to axe the show. It's a shame, because the show's creators had quite a bit more planned to adapt the rest of Robert Jordan's lengthy series: at least five more seasons.

By all accounts, the series has been well-received by fans. I muddled my way through the first season before giving up, but I also never could get into the novels. But I have seen fans of the books really enjoy it. TO Slacker Adam M. noted that he was a huge fan of the series and that he enjoyed the decisions they made to adapt the massive books to television: "I thought they were doing really well, but I'm also a fan of adaptations that use the book just as raw material rather than 1-to-1 comparisons."

"Costumes and worldbuilding? Stunning. Acting? Good for Moiraine, the rest were getting better (they were finally getting to Rand's madness in this season, and it was moving along well). I enjoyed that they were leaning into a lot of things that Jordan touched on (gender dynamics, power questions, etc.) and leaned further than Jordan ever would .. S3 of WoT was loosening the ropes and the characters were actually having fun--something I think we need more of in big budget fantasy, and something that WoT the books encourages. The characters actually laughed and danced and sang, which just humanizes a show especially when it's about the struggle with darkness."

That tracks with what I'd been seeing others say about the series: that it had finally hit its stride and was becoming a great series.

But at the same time, I've always had in the back of my head a question about how well you can really adapt such a huge series. There's a lot of material to go through, even if you cut away some of the bloat of the novels, and I've always thought it was a little strange that Prime was bankrolling both this series, and another epic fantasy at the same time: The Rings of Power.

HBO's Game of Thrones had demonstrated that there was a huge audience for big-budget epic fantasy on television, and when Prime Video picked up The Wheel of Time in 2018, GoT was heading into its final seasons, and everyone was looking for a successor to capture that audience. When the series was first announced in 2016, streaming television was in its wild west years: companies and studios were throwing money at the wall to see what sticked, including some of these massive undertakings with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars per season.

At the time The Wheel of Time was greenlit, subscriber numbers was the bigger number: everyone was chasing after as many people as they could lock into their respective services. Rings of Power is thought to have cost around a billion dollars between the rights and first season, and while The Wheel of Time didn't come close to that, it was still an expensive production.

I'm going to point back to a piece that I wrote a couple of weeks ago about Andor, and how the streaming environment of the mid-2010s is vastly different from that of 2025. As the streaming environment has tightened, the metrics have changed: those shows with price tags that range from $200 to $400 million for a couple of short seasons just doesn't make much sense when it costs more to borrow and when investors are increasingly more concerned with these companies ensuring that they'll be profitable.

In a lot of ways, that's a bit of a shame, because that amount of money sloshing around Hollywood really allowed for some big hits like Andor, The Wheel of Time, and Rings of Power. Whether or not you're a huge fan of any of these, the size and reach of these companies really enables them to put a lot of money into some incredible-looking entertainment. With those budgets tightening up, we'll see more shows like The Wheel of Time get the axe. We've already seen Andor come to an end, but other big fantasy shows like Netflix's The Witcher, 3-Body Problem, and Stranger Things and HBO's House of the Dragon are coming to planned endings in the near term, and others have been moving forward with more cost-effectiveness in mind, like Apple's Foundation.

At the same time, we're seeing that those enormous budgets aren't necessarily the key to a smash hit: just look at HBO's The Pitt, which is not only fantastic, but also relatively cheap to produce, which was by design. But budgets do allow storytellers to tell stories that they might not otherwise be able to tell: the real-world infrastructure and logistics helps shape the types of things that make it to our screens. The Pitt isn't intrinsically better than The Wheel of Time, they're just different types of stories, and we'll likely see more of one than the other for the foreseeable future.

It's also worth noting that we've started to see these companies begin exploring ways to offset these costs: they've started selling the syndication rights for these shows: Amazon just brought Rings of Power and Citadel before potential buyers, while The Pitt is headed to TNT this fall, and most streaming services now have some sort of ad-supported tier for subscribers.

If I have to guess, we'll see streaming services like Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Netflix, Paramount+, and others continue to tighten their budgets, while still occasionally making the big swing for a show when it makes sense. HBO, for example, isn't giving up on Westeros. While House of the Dragon is coming to an end, another series, A Knight of Seven Kingdoms is coming next year – but even that is designed to be cheaper. Back in March, The Hollywood Reporter spoke with HBO's executive team in charge of original programming, who yielded some interesting insights:

You’ve collectively survived multiple regimes. What’s been the biggest challenge to this one? 

Sarah Aubrey: Our challenges are specific to us, in some respects, but the whole business has lived through an earthquake going back to a couple years ago when it just became apparent that everyone can’t just spend like a tech company, making as many shows as you can, as fast as you can. Between that and the strike, there have been seismic shifts, and we all have to deal with those in various ways in our creative lives.
 
Francesca Orsi: I like being charged. As much as there was a day of budgets being a bit more robust and now, while they continue to be for a number of shows, there are some shows that we’re being charged with making for far less. I have an example that really took me aback. We’re doing a Game of Throne spinoff titled A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for under $10 million in episode, [which is peanuts] relative to what Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon cost episodically. And the battle sequences that the directors achieved match those across Game of Thrones and are a fraction of the price, so it’s a lesson for us that we need to be challenging these budgets.

The we "can’t just spend like a tech company, making as many shows as you can, as fast as you can" really stood out for me when I first read that, and the anecdote about the next Game of Thrones series costing around $10 million an episode (around half of what an episode House of The Dragon costs) drives home that whatever genre TV we'll see hitting screens in the next couple of years, the epic scale and flair that shows like The Wheel of Time and Rings of Power and Andor are probably behind us, at least for now.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially when Rings of Power seems to have sort of muddled its way through based on brand recognition and the sunk-cost fallacy alone. Those enormous budgets does bring out shows that look spectacular and which can tell stories that really fit their settings, but as we've seen, those huge budgets mean that they're not sustainable in the long run. An eight-season run of The Wheel of Time was probably never going to happen, and while Rings of Power has a planned five-episode arc, the only way I can see it getting to that point is because Amazon has invested so much time and money into it already that they've passed the point of no return.

So what will we see? Certainly, science fiction and fantasy isn't going anywhere, although we'll likely see the field thin out a little as these more expensive shows work their way out of the system. My guess is that we'll see more of an emphasis on shows with budgets that are a bit more contained, with executives and producers considering adaptations with more of an eye towards "can this be shot for $5-10 million per episode" rather than "sky's the limit. Apple's Murderbot feels like it's more in line with that thinking than say, Rings of Power or The Wheel of Time.

I wonder about what shows that we've seen put into development will actually make it through under this environment. A24's Earthsea? Prime Video's Consider Phlebas/Culture? Prime Video's Mercy of the Gods? Lev Grossman's The Bright Sword? More than one season of Apple's Neuromancer? Netflix's Old Man's War? J. Michael Straczynski's remake of Babylon 5? If I had to guess, most of those now have a harder time, considering that some of them, like Consider Phlebas, Mercy of the Gods or Old Man's War are set in some huge worlds. It's not impossible, but I can see them stalling for the time being. And certainly, any big original genre shows are probably also going to be backburnered, if anything because they don't have that theoretical built-in audience or name recognition.

For fans of The Wheel of Time, it's a shame that they won't be able to see where this series could go if given a little more time, and it's even more frustrating (or maybe it's a relief) for this decision to come down to factors that are systemic to the industry as a whole that are outside of the hands of the show's creatives. Either way, the era produced some good television and storytelling for huge audiences, attention that will hopefully encourage those viewers to pick up the books and discover the rest of the story for themselves.