Eragon Rides Again: Disney+ Still Developing the Long-Awaited TV Series
Four years after first taking flight, the Eragon series at Disney+ has finally assembled a creative team, proving the dragon saga is still very much alive.
If you figured Disney+ quietly buried its Eragon show somewhere in a vault under Burbank, same. But nope — the dragon egg is still warm, and the series just took a real step forward with an actual creative team.
So, who is steering this dragon?
- Todd Harthan ('High Potential') is co-creating the series with author Christopher Paolini and will co-showrun.
- Todd Helbing ('Superman & Lois') is on board as the other co-showrunner.
- Marc Webb ('The Amazing Spider-Man') has signed on as an executive producer.
- A writers room opened late last year — always a good sign this isn’t just a press release in search of a pilot.
Quick refresher: what is The Inheritance Cycle?
It follows Eragon, a farm kid who finds a mysterious egg that hatches into a dragon he names Saphira. With his mentor Brom, he learns what it means to be a Dragon Rider — a once-mighty order everyone thought the tyrant king Galbatorix had erased. Eragon and Saphira set out to take down Galbatorix and free the land of Alagaesia.
How we got here (and why fans are wary)
Christopher Paolini wrote 'Eragon' as a teenager, it blew up into a bestseller, and Hollywood moved fast: 20th Century Fox grabbed the rights. The movie that followed? Critics torched it, and despite Paolini writing multiple follow-ups, any film sequels died right there.
It has been two decades since that first movie (yes, really), and fans have been itching for a do-over that actually captures the books. Disney+ has been in the second-chance business lately: Rick Riordan’s 'Percy Jackson' got a TV reboot on the streamer a few years back and landed far better than Fox’s two films, 'Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief' and 'Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters'.
Where things stand now
Four years after Disney first said it was developing an Inheritance Cycle series, the Eragon show is still in active development at Disney+ — now with co-showrunners, an EP, and a writers room. In other words: this one’s finally moving from 'remember when?' to 'okay, let’s see what you’ve got'.