‘Fourth Wing’ TV show release window, cast, and more
Fourth Wing is getting a TV series! Amazon MGM Studios has purchased the rights to Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean book series.
Even more interestingly, the series is being produced by Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society. Outlier Society has been Jordan’s way of further supporting Black and brown stories, producing N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series and Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse. Though Fourth Wing is written by a white woman, the book does feature a Black male lead. Yarros has protected the lead character, Xaden Riorson, from a fandom that tends to whitewash him.
Yarros and Liz Pelletier, founder of Fourth Wing’s publishing house, Entangled Publishing, and its imprint Red Tower, are also reportedly executive producers on the series.
Fourth Wing series release window
Neither Yarros nor Outlier Society has announced a release date for the new series. Don’t worry, though, Empyrean fans! Things are moving. In July 2024, Outlier Society announced the show had finally found its showrunner in Moira Walley-Becket, a screenwriter and producer known for her work on Anne with an E and as a writer on Breaking Bad. In an interview with Variety during the Onyx Storm press tour, Yarros shared she had read the pilot script and “was kicking her feet the entire time.” Given what we know thus far, the Fourth Wing series could premiere in late 2025 or early 2026 at the earliest, though 2026 seems more likely.
While Yarros has released three of the five planned books in the Empyrean series now that Onyx Storm has hit shelves, the adaptation was announced when only the first book was out. This is far from the first time a popular but incomplete book series has been given an adaptation, the most notable being Harry Potter and the most infamous being Game of Thrones. While Yarros has time to write more in the series, there could be complications if the TV series catches up to or surpasses the published books, much like the issues Game of Thrones faced in its later seasons. For what it’s worth, however, Yarros told Variety there is “no chance” the show gets ahead of her writing.
Fourth Wing series cast
Not only is there no news on who’s playing Xaden Riorson and Violet Sorrengail in the show, Yarros recently explained there isn’t even a casting director yet. We might not know who’s playing who (I’m hoping for some fresh faces on the cast), but one thing is certain: Yarros’ commitment to a diverse cast. She shared that Xaden is “not white” and should be played by a POC. “Moira and I have had really great conversations about that,” she told Variety, “and she knows how important it is to me that we not remove marginalized people from the cast.”
What is Fourth Wing about?
The book is a fantasy romance (or “romantasy”) novel featuring diverse characters, dragons, and other fun fantastical elements. It is not traditional Young Adult literature; instead, it has been marketed as being for New Adults, a burgeoning niche that skews a little older than YA books do, allowing authors to cover slightly more adult topics. That’s why Fourth Wing and its sequels, Iron Flame and Onyx Storm, have quite a few… spicy scenes.
The official plot synopsis of Fourth Wing is as follows:
“Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.
But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away…because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.
With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.
She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.
Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.
Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.”
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