It turns out Red Eagle Entertainment purchased the media rights to The Wheel of Time in the mid-2000s and proceeded to fail miserably with everything the company dipped their fingers into be it comic books, video games, or television and film. Red Eagle even attempted a crowdfunding project to produce a mobile game based on the property and only raised $3000 of a goal of $450k – an unmitigated disaster on a project with an insane funding goal. What isn’t clear is if Red Eagle Entertainment even holds the rights to produce anything based on The Wheel of Time since indications are the company resold the tv and film rights to Universal Pictures in 2008.
It isn’t clear if there was any involvement from Universal with Winter Dragon, but it turns out if nothing had aired based on The Wheel of Time by February 11th, 2005 the rigths would return to the Jordan estate, aka the Bandersnatch Group, overseen by Jordan’s widow Harriet McDougal. So it appears Red Eagle threw together a last minute “pilot” to continue to tie up the rights for a few more years. Winter Dragon isn’t horrible – it surely isn’t good either – but it reminds me of all those cheapy Canadian programs that used to air in syndication during the late 1990s; I suppose Billy Zane must have had a free weekend and owed someone a big favor…
McDougal certainly isn’t happy and released this statement earlier today:
“This morning brought startling news. A “pilot” for a Wheel of Time series, the “pilot” being called Winter Dragon, had appeared at 1:30 in the morning, East Coast time, on FXX TV, a channel somewhere in the 700s (founded to concentrate on comedy, according to the Washington Post).
It was made without my knowledge or cooperation. I never saw the script. No one associated with Bandersnatch Group, the successor-in-interest to James O. Rigney, was aware of this.
Bandersnatch has an existing contract with Universal Pictures that grants television rights to them until this Wednesday, February 11 – at which point these rights revert to Bandersnatch.
I see no mention of Universal in the “pilot”. Nor, I repeat, was Bandersnatch, or Robert Jordan’s estate, informed of this in any way.
I am dumbfounded by this occurrence, and am taking steps to prevent its reoccurrence.”
Obviously with the success of Game of Thrones, and the optioning of other fantasy properties like Terry Brooks’ Shannara, there’s huge money at stake with The Wheel of Time if the series is competently handled; the key word there is “competently” and nothing Red Eagle has done to this date has shown common sense let alone competence.
I’m sure there will be plenty of lawyers involved shortly and we’ll have to see how all this surrounding The Wheel of Time “turns” out. Pun intended…
You can check out Winter Dragon below.
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