The Myst TV series is dead; long live the Myst TV series

Myst blew my mind over and over again, even before I popped it into the drive. In 1994, it was one of the first CD-ROMs that my family purchased, and I couldn’t believe how technology had managed to capture a damn rainbow, stick it into a plastic wafer, and store a then-seemingly-photorealistic virtual world inside.

That’s why my nostalgia flared up in 2014 when I heard Myst would be getting its own TV series from Legendary. It’s also why it’s flaring up again today: Village Roadshow Entertainment, the co-producer and financier of a lot of movies you’ve probably heard of, has purchased the rights to create a Myst TV series and / or films.

But if Village Roadshow has the rights, does that mean Legendary doesn’t? And that it’s probably starting from scratch instead of imminently putting a Myst TV show on Hulu?

I reached out to Myst’s original co-creators, Rand and Robyn Miller, on Twitter to see what happened, and it turns out the answer is yes:

Hi Sean. Myst project with Legendary is dead. I’m not involved with this. Our youngest brother @rsjmiller is writing first draft of screenplay.

— Robyn Miller (@tinselman) June 26, 2019

Village Roadshow says Rand and youngest brother Ryan will help produce the new work, which will “expand upon the game’s existing mythology to develop a multi-platform universe including film, scripted and unscripted television content,” according to a press release.

I only ever knew and loved the first game in the series (my brother says I’m missing out), so I’ll leave it to you to decide if Village Roadshow’s understanding of Myst sounds accurate:

The vast MYST canon has over 10,000 years of history, but its primary saga follows Atrus, a brilliant (if a bit naïve) grandson of Anna, a woman who triggers a world-shaping set of events when she discovers the D’ni civilization in a cavern deep below the New Mexico desert. The D’ni have a unique ability to write books that can link to other worlds. The discovery of their ability and the clash of cultures is the catalyst for the MYST novels and games.

As eager as I am to see where it might take the worlds, I’m not holding my breath: thrice, we’ve been told that Halo would get an ambitious live-action adaptation, but names like Peter Jackson, Alex Garland, Guillermo del Toro, Neill Blomkamp, D.B. Weiss, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott haven’t been enough to make it happen.

Update, 9:30 PM ET: Added confirmation from Robyn Miller that the earlier Myst TV project is dead, and corrected that Robyn is not involved.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18760000/myst-game-tv-series-film-village-roadshow