After a lengthy period of silence, Red Eagle have commented on Dragonmount that the WoT movie remains an ongoing project. They're still in the scriptwriting stage, but apparently think 2012 is a realistic release date for the EYE OF THE WORLD film. Needless to say this is highly unlikely, with no announced screenwriter, no director attached yet (the minimum requirement to get the film out in 2-2.5 years) and, vitally, still no greenlight from Universal. Most ludicrously, Larry Mondragon's comments indicate they don't even know how many films they are shooting for, something I imagine Universal would want to know as a minimum before committing to the project.

The format also sounds dubious. A trilogy to start with, spanning the events of the first three books, and then the later storylines combined and shaken up and several more films' worth of plot extracted to complete the series. Needless to say, this will involve vast numbers of characters, storylines and subplots being cut and jettisoned, which is probably going to alienate chunks of the fanbase.

In conclusion, this film project route still sounds hopelessly unrealistic. I'm wondering if Universal thought, "44 million book sales? Sweet! Let's have a piece of that action!" without reading the books and now having seen what they're taking on have now gotten more hesitant about the project. But we'll see, if as Red Eagle suggests, if there is any more movement on the project in the coming months.