The Things We Leave Unfinished has a director. Lionsgate tapped Thea Sharrock to helm the adaptation of the Rebecca Yarros novel, and if you know Yarros primarily from Fourth Wing, this is going to be a different conversation entirely.
Fourth Wing made Yarros a household name, but her readers, the ones who were there before the dragon books took over BookTok, will tell you that The Things We Leave Unfinished is actually her best work. I have heard this from enough people that I stopped questioning it. The novel works with two timelines and two love stories, connected by a single manuscript that bridges decades. It is the kind of structure that could fall apart easily on screen, but when it works, it gives you something like The Notebook meets Atonement, a story that earns its emotional weight by making you live in two eras simultaneously.
Yarros herself has called it her favorite book she has written, which is notable given how massive the Fourth Wing phenomenon became. When an author with that level of commercial success points to a quieter, more personal novel as the one closest to her heart, that tells you something about the material.
Thea Sharrock is an interesting choice for this. She directed Me Before You, which had to walk a razor thin line between genuine emotion and sentimentality. She mostly pulled it off, and that film performed well enough to prove she can handle literary adaptations with big emotional swings. The dual timeline structure of this novel is going to be a real test, though. You need a director who can make two separate love stories feel equally urgent, and who can handle the transitions between past and present without losing the audience.
There is no release date yet, but Lionsgate is clearly positioning this as their next big literary adaptation play. They have had success in this space before, and Yarros brings a built in audience that rivals some of the biggest names in the romance and fantasy space. The question is whether they can translate a book that is beloved specifically for its intimacy into something that works at a theatrical scale.
I think there is a real movie here. The premise is strong, the source material is well regarded by the people who know it best, and Sharrock has the right sensibility for this kind of story. If Lionsgate gives it the budget and marketing push it deserves, this could be the adaptation that introduces a whole new audience to what Yarros can do when she is not writing about dragons.
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