'Wheel of Time' Release Month Revealed at Comic-Con Panel

There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of The Wheel of Time, but there will be a [...]

There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of The Wheel of Time, but there will be a beginning in November of 2021. On Friday, Amazon Prime Video announced that the adaptation of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novels will premiere in November, giving eager fans a long-awaited hint about the timing. This and other details came out during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con with showrunner Rafe Judkins.

The Wheel of Time's production has been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, and fans were beginning to doubt that the show would air in 2021. On Friday, Judkins put them at ease with a new poster that says that the show will come out in November. The show has already been renewed for a second season which is in production, and Judkins talked about the process at length during a virtual panel.

"It was this book series that connected us with others — especially after I came out of the closet — it was this thing that let us see what it's like to be a person who's different in the world," Judkins explained.

Judkins tried to give fans hints about what they could expect in the series, comparing it to the first novel, The Eye of the World. While that book frames Rand al'Thor as the main protagonist, Judkins said that in the show, Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) takes more of a lead role. This may help flesh out the fictional world a bit faster, and ease into the later parts of the story where no single character can be called the "star."

Still, any change from the books is bound to upset some fans. Commenters also raged about the fact that they still haven't seen a trailer for the show. Some also made dire predictions that the whole fantasy adaptation genre was doomed because of Game of Thrones, but Judkins joked that that will not be the case here.

"My danger will be never running out of books — the challenge that we face is how do we tell this story the most cohesively and coherently in what is a reasonable number of episodes," he said. As for being faithful to the source material, Judkins said: "Obviously, I want to stay as close to the books as we possibly can — these are really beloved books, I love them, there's a great story there, we want to tell it and we want to tell it in the way that's best for television. Like, this really is a true adaptation of the series, so there will be a lot of things that are different than the books certainly, but I think it stays true to the heart of the books and the spine of the storytelling."

While speculation and predictions run wild on social media, we are only a few months away from fans seeing The Wheel of Time for themselves. The show premieres in November on Amazon Video. In the meantime, you can check out Jordan's original books here in print, digital and audiobook formats. There are 14 novels in the series as well as one prequel best read at the end.

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