Prime Video’s television adaptation of the popular fantasy book Fourth Wing just got some heat behind it as Moira Walley-Beckett, best known as the creator of Anne with an E and a writer on Breaking Bad, has been tapped as the showrunner. Fourth Wing is the first in The Empyrean series by author Rebecca Yarros and is set in a fictional land that follows 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail as she attends Basgiath War College, a school where the motto is graduate or die. Violet is enrolled by her mother to become a dragon rider in a story that could be pitched as Top Gun meets How to Train Your Dragon, with a lot of romance.
According to Variety, Moira Walley-Beckett has joined Prime Video’s Fourth Wing television adaptation as series showrunner. The series, produced by Amazon MGM and Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society, entered development in October 2023. Walley-Beckett will also serve as a producer for the series alongside original author Rebecca Yarros, Michael B. Jordan, Outlier president Elizabeth Raposo, Outlier Society executive vice president of TV Stefano Agosto, and Entangled Publishing’s Liz Pelletier.
Fourth Wing Could Be the Next TV Fantasy Epic
Fourth Wing was published on April 5, 2023, and quickly became a phenomenon, particularly through exposure on TikTok. It has spent a whole year on the New York Times’s Best Seller List. The second entry in The Empyrean series, Iron Flame, was released on October 31, 2023. That was just six months after the first novel’s publication and the same date that Michael B. Jordan’s production company, Outlier Society, acquired the rights to the property. The third entry in the series, Onyx Storm, will hit the market on January 21, 2025.
Walley-Beckett is certainly a major get for Fourth Wing in terms of talent behind the scenes. Originally an actress, she pivoted to writing and joined Breaking Bad in Season 2 as a story editor, eventually getting promoted to writer and co-producer. She wrote some of the most beloved episodes of Breaking Bad, including “Fly” and “Ozymandias,” the latter of which has been called one of the best episodes of television ever made by fans and critics alike. She went on to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for “Ozymandias.”
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Walley-Becket later created Starz’s Flesh and Bone, and CBC/Netflix’s Anne With an E. Anne With an E became another critical hit and ran for three seasons. Between the three novels, Moira Walley-Beckett certainly has plenty of material to pull from. With dragons, romance, and a large fanbase, Fourth Wing has the potential to be Prime Video’s next big series that could effectively rival HBO’s House of the Dragon, more so than Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.