Despite how unlikely it seemed last summer, Village Roadshow’s universe of Myst content—inspired and adapted from the iconic computer game of the same name—is actually moving forward (just very slowly, almost as if it’s going through one static image at a time and then randomly clicking on things until something works). According to Deadline, the studio has hired X-Men: First Class writer and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles veteran Ashley Edward Miller to write its TV show version of Myst, which everyone seems to be assuming will follow the basic mythology of the Myst brand. To put it extremely briefly: There’s a guy named Atrus whose grandmother discovered a mystical civilization with the ability to use books to transport people to different worlds. There are some power struggles, people get trapped in books, and there’s an island full of somewhat arcane puzzles that often involves finding missing pages from magic books. It was made by brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, and there was a sequel to Myst called Riven: The Sequel To Myst (one of the all-time great sequel titles).
Of course, Village Roadshow’s plans go far beyond a TV show. As we learned last year, it’s planning a “multi-platform universe” that includes scripted TV, movies, and unscripted TV—whatever that means. Given the history of cinematic universes, though, we would hope that Village Roadshow is holding off on any movies and reality shows about Myst (?) until it sees how this TV show goes. We’re still waiting on that Flash movie, and Tom Cruise’s Mummy fighting Angelina Jolie’s Bride Of Frankenstein, and the epic Dark Tower movie series that’ll have a full TV series in the middle. After all, we’d hate to have another failed cinematic universe to make snarky jokes about. Nobody would enjoy that.