Screenplay updates circulating

# Screenplay updates circulating Two adaptation updates landed within days of each other. Brandon Sanderson said on April 4 that his *Mistborn* screenplay is now 50% complete and that he is talking with Apple about expectations, while director Jake Schreier said on April 7 that Lee Sung Jin and Joanna Calo are writing a new draft of Marvel’s *X-Men* reboot. (brandonsanderson.com) Taken together, the updates show how much of today’s screen business runs on translation work. Studios are not just buying books or comic brands; they are hiring writers who can turn giant fictional systems into scenes, dialogue, and character conflict that work on screen. (brandonsanderson.com) Sanderson’s side of the story starts with control. His official film-and-television page says Apple picked up the Cosmere universe, with *Mistborn* being developed for film and *The Stormlight Archive* being eyed for television, and Sanderson’s own site currently lists the *Mistborn* screenplay at 50% complete. (brandonsanderson.com) That matters because *Mistborn* is not a small, self-contained premise. It is part of Sanderson’s larger Cosmere setting, a connected fantasy universe with its own magic systems, history, and internal rules, which means adaptation requires more than trimming a novel down to two hours. (brandonsanderson.com) In his latest weekly update, Sanderson said the screenplay remains his main focus and that he has received encouraging feedback from Apple. His homepage and YouTube channel both reflect the same message: the script is active, moving, and being handled by the author himself rather than handed off entirely to outside screenwriters. (brandonsanderson.com) That author-led approach is unusual at this scale. Film and television rights deals often separate the novelist from the day-to-day drafting process, but Sanderson’s current setup appears designed to preserve tone, lore, and long-range franchise planning while still shaping the material into a screenplay. That last point is partly an inference from the official status updates and Apple deal framing, rather than a separately announced contract clause. (brandonsanderson.com) The *X-Men* side shows a different route to the same destination. According to Schreier’s comments reported by Collider, Deadline, and Variety, Marvel has brought in Lee Sung Jin, the creator of *Beef*, and Joanna Calo, a key creative force behind *The Bear* and a writer on *Thunderbolts*, to work on the current draft. (collider.com) That pairing makes sense once you look at the property. Schreier told Collider that when you read *X-Men* comics, you find ideology and interpersonal drama with a soap-opera quality, which lines up with the strengths of writers known for pressure-cooker character work rather than only spectacle. (collider.com) It also suggests Marvel is still defining what kind of movie its mutant reboot should be. Multiple reports describe Sung Jin and Calo as working on a new draft or rewrite, which means the project is still in development rather than locked into a final script and production plan. (variety.com) The common thread between *Mistborn* and *X-Men* is not genre. One comes from bestselling fantasy novels and the other from superhero comics, but both are examples of intellectual property with deep backstory, large fan expectations, and enough built-in lore to overwhelm a movie if the writing does not simplify and prioritize. (brandonsanderson.com) That is why “worldbuilding” keeps showing up in the conversation. In prose, worldbuilding can live in exposition, appendices, or internal narration; in a screenplay, every rule has to surface through action, image, and spoken conflict, often under a two-hour time limit. This is a general screenwriting inference drawn from the format difference between novels and films, applied here to these two adaptation cases. (brandonsanderson.com) For writers, the opportunity is specific. The market signal here is not simply “adaptations are popular”; it is that companies are actively looking for people who can compress sprawling fictional universes into emotionally legible scripts without losing the property’s signature feel. (brandonsanderson.com) For audiences, these are still early-to-mid development signals, not release announcements. Sanderson is halfway through a screenplay as of April 2026, and Marvel’s *X-Men* is still on a draft being shaped by new writers, so the real takeaway is motion: two high-profile franchises are being actively rewritten for the screen right now. (brandonsanderson.com)