The first attempt to adapt ‘The Wheel of Time’ was made for entirely cynical reasons and ended with a grieving widow being sued

For those of you blissfully unaware of the cursed pilot episode known as “Winter Dragon,” this ongoing $100 million adaptation of The Wheel of Time on Prime Video might come off as subpar, but having looked into that abyssal void of insanity where dreams go to die, we’re sure there’s nothing the team at Amazon could do to mess things up as hard as that Billy Zane-led prologue did in 2015.

There are basically two reactions to watching that 20-minute outing. People who don’t know what The Wheel of Time is will go, “What the hell did I just watch?” and people who do know what The Wheel of Time is will go, “What the hell did I just watch?” And no wonder, as the sole reason Red Eagle Entertainment made it was to retain the rights to the television adaptation.

It’s a common enough practice in the industry. When a studio has warehoused the rights to a particular story and not done anything with it, they can revert back to the original owner, who, in this case, would be the so-called Team Jordan, consisting of the late Robert Jordan’s close associates, including his wife, Harriet McDougal. Harriet served as the story’s editor throughout its 20-year run, and to this day, she remains the foremost authority on all things Wheel of Time.

The rights to The Wheel of Time were supposed to go null on Feb. 11, 2015, but Red Eagle brought together a makeshift crew to shoot a pilot episode and paid FFX to air it during an infomercial timeslot, getting away with it on a technicality, and rather narrowly, at that. Thus was the infamous “Winter Dragon” pilot born, which remains a standing joke in the community to this day.

Terrible, ridiculous, unbelievably whimsical. None of these words manage to quite capture how utterly awful Winter Dragon is. But hey, don’t take our word for it.

Robert Jordan’s widow, Harriet, wrote a blog condemning Red Eagle and citing that the rights have gone back to Universal, but Red Eagle filed a lawsuit claiming that their hold on The Wheel of Time name was legitimate. After a brief legal battle, where Red Eagle understandably brought the fandom’s wrath upon itself, the company withdrew its claims and dismissed the action.

If this drama sounds familiar to you, it’s because something eerily similar happened in the world of comics in 1994. We’re, of course, referring to the unreleased Fantastic Four movie starring Alex Hyde-White and Rebecca Staab, which was supposed to be a placeholder before getting leaked online. And much like Winter Dragon, that flick is also abysmal in terms of production value.

History repeats itself, even if it’s Hollywood and their absurd idiosyncrasies.