It’s been a turbulent ride for author LaDarrion Williams’ to get his story of a Black teen with ancestral magic adapted for the small screen.
His short film, Blood at the Root, went viral in 2021. Hollywood producers and executives showed interest in 2023, but suggested that it was “not marketable,” he said. Undaunted, he turned the short into a novel, and it became a New York Times bestseller in 2024.
But even after Malcolm D. Lee’s Blackmaled Productions optioned the novel in 2023, it was soon the same old story: rejection after rejection. A story about a 17-year-old boy who gets accepted to a magical HBCU where he discovers dark secrets about his family was labeled too similar to Harry Potter. Or he was told executives weren’t interested in young adult subject matter. Yet, he read in Hollywood trade outlets and other news media that other adaptations were being greenlit and recommended as the next Harry Potter-adjacent hit.
“It’s very purposeful, what we’re seeing,” Williams scorned.
Black authors like Williams, whose adaptations have been in a particular “development hell” for years that sometimes resulted in them losing their options altogether, have watched the work of some of their white counterparts get “fast-tracked.”
This May, Deadline highlighted the many books that have had or will see TV adaptations this year. Among them, only two were by Black authors. That disparity reignited discourse around not only the increasing dearth of Black stories on the small screen, but also the deep-rooted issue of buzzy Black books whose previously announced adaptations have quietly disappeared from the radar.
Those include adaptations of Akwaeke Emezi’s genre-defying debut novel Freshwater, Brit Bennett’s New York Times bestseller The Vanishing Half, Kacen Callendar’s queer young adult novel Felix Ever After, and Brandon Taylor’s semiautobiographical coming-of-age-novel Real Life. Each of those was announced throughout 2019-2020, without a single update since.
Aaron Foley, the author of 2022’s Boys Come First, is in a similar boat as Williams. Foley’s book tells the story of three gay millennial Black men navigating friendships, love, and personal challenges amid a gentrifying Detroit. In 2022, Amazon Studios secured the rights to develop a TV series based on the book under Field Trip Productions’ overall deal with the platform. That two-year option with Amazon has since expired following rounds of script rewrites.
To Foley, the Boys Come First adaptation is a project that “can open the door for Black gay directors and Black gay [production assistants] and Black gay at every level.”
There was a lot of excitement around Boys Come First leading up to the Writers Guild of America strike in 2023. After the fourth-month strike ended, however, Field Trip told Foley that Amazon had since brought on new staff that were reevaluating all projects that had been finalized or were in development prior to the strike. So, when screenwriter Charles Haywood submitted the first draft of the script to Amazon, it began a series of revisions that in the end undercut the intent and specificity of the story.
The first batch, Foley recalled, was that the characters were “a little bit too Black” and that if they wanted it to work as a gay show, it needed to have “wider appeal.”
The process only became more exasperating for Foley from there.
Navigating “development hell”
Williams’ short film Blood at the Root went viral around the time when Black Hogwarts, a nod to the school at the center of the Harry Potter universe, was trending on TikTok in 2023. When Williams turned it into a novel and landed a three-book deal, Blackmaled Productions optioned it for a series adaptation just before the writers’ strike. Blackmaled has a first-look deal at Universal Television, which means Universal has the right of first refusal to develop Blackmaled projects.
Following the strike, Williams and the Blackmaled team attempted to hit the ground running but was met with a slew of obstacles that slowed things down for them — from Hollywood’s post-strike labor contraction to the process of securing showrunners. After the team was finally able to send out a pitch to a studio in January 2025, they were advised to find an additional production company to partner with Blackmaled. That’s around when the goalposts began moving farther away.
Blackmaled pitched Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society Productions, which has a first-look deal with Amazon Studios. Williams said that Outlier executives pitched it to Amazon and were told by the streamer that the book skewed too closely to Harry Potter. They also said that Amazon was not buying young adult projects. After the Blood at the Root team reworked the pitch to amplify its mature themes to fit a new adult angle, Outlier ultimately passed. Ryan Coogler’s Proximity Media, which the Blood at the Root team also pitched in 2025, passed as well, citing the book’s similarities to Harry Potter.
Increasingly frustrated, Williams began to notice a pattern around what was being greenlit. Legendary Pictures paid seven figures for SenLinYu’s Alchemised, a Harry Potter fan fiction book. Outlier and Amazon announced a series adaptation of Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing, which Collider described as “the perfect Harry Potter replacement.” Additionally, Publishers Weekly reported just a few weeks ago that Amazon has become a leading destination for fans of YA novel adaptations.
Williams first recalled bringing up that trend with the Blackmaled team last year: “I was like, ‘They are buying YA. They’re just not buying Black YA.’”
After the team unsuccessfully pitched Blood at the Root at Universal again in July 2025, a year and a half after the book was first optioned, Williams amicably parted ways with Blackmaled and the showrunners. Subsequent rejections from Starz and a producer from Apple TV+ earlier this year, managed through Williams’ literary agent, left the author feeling even more discouraged.
“Right now we’re in limbo,” Williams said. “I don’t know what’s what. This is 2026. This has been going on since 2023.”
“Stripping away all of the personality”
After Foley got the initial feedback from Amazon, his first reaction was one of confusion: “We’re in Detroit.”
He knew, however, that he had to be mindful that his story was in the hands of others. So Haywood and Foley toned down the Blackness. In turn, they dialed up the queerness and gay references.
Amazon’s response to that second draft? “‘A little too gay now,’” Foley said.
“They’re just stripping away all of the personality,” Foley recalled Haywood telling him on a call afterward. “If a Black person were to watch it, they would not feel themselves. If a gay person were to, they’d only half feel themselves because they’re gay on paper, but they’re not gay in their actions.”
Foley regrouped and worked with Haywood to adhere to Amazon’s feedback. Once Amazon rejected the third draft, though, Haywood, APA Artists Management (Haywood’s talent agency at the time), Field Trip, and Foley decided to let the Amazon option lapse and pursue other opportunities. Then, Field Trip, which Foley said had believed so strongly in Boys Comes First, quietly shut down without informing them.
“The fact that they all just abandoned it was just the worst part,” Foley said. “I know you’re not supposed to trust nobody in the business but, damn, they really sold it in the beginning.”
Today, with mainly only Haywood and Foley hanging on to the project, Haywood reached out to his management team, Heroes and Villains, to ask for help shopping around the Boys Come First pilot. Heroes and Villains told them that the project would need three Black gay millennial A-list actors to move forward.
When Haywood and Foley sent a list of Black millennial gay actors, including some who messaged Foley directly about their interest in the project, Heroes and Villains suggested that there’s only one Black gay star in Hollywood who could sell the project.
“No, you need Colman Domingo,” Foley recalled them saying, “or three 30-something Colman Domingos.”
Foley was appalled. “This is where I turn from being humble to being, like, ‘Are you serious?’” he said.
Like Williams, Foley began to take stock of the Hollywood landscape. Heroes and Villains’ feedback happened at the height of Heated Rivalry, HBO Max and Crave’s series adaptation of Rachel Reid’s gay sports romance novel that catapulted the profiles of previously unknown and mostly white stars.
“How many other gay novelists or gay folks with [intellectual property] that have a gay focus are looking at Heated Rivalry in my position like, ‘Well, damn, why them and not us?’” Foley said.
Still, he was hesitant to conclude that the recent wave of anti-DEI sentiment contributed to Boys Comes First’s fate. He did, however, suggest that Boys Comes First being Black and gay could have had an effect.
“Once the two come together, that’s where I sort of think maybe some of the anti-DEI sentiment is,” Foley said. “You can’t check too many boxes at the same time. It either has to be Black or queer — but it can’t be too Black, it can’t be too queer. It can’t be too much of one or another.”
Williams was less tempered about the same subject.
“Obviously it’s the Trump administration,” he said. “I think a lot of studios — they’re going back to regular programming. The whole ‘read Black writers,’ that’s over. Because we’re seeing white books being adapted. And they’re not even just being adapted, they’re being fast-tracked.”
To Williams’ point, the TV adaptation of Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which was published in 2024, premiered on Apple TV+ in April. The film adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, which was published in 2022, premiered on Netflix in May.
Meanwhile, the only Black novel adaptation that currently has an actual release date is next year’s Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi’s 2018 YA novel that was first optioned in 2017 before being bounced to three other studios. Williams is jaded about how its potential success could impact the outcome of other Black adaptations.
“If that movie does well, are they gonna look for more?” Williams asked. “I don’t know, because look what Sinners did. I don’t think they’re looking for another Sinners.”
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