How Foundation Finally Got The Rights To Asimov's Robot Stories, Explained By The Showrunner [Exclusive]

Right now, one of the most challenging adaptations currently in the works is Mike Flanagan's highly anticipated "Dark Tower" TV series, a story that combines so many Stephen King properties with rights distributed among different studios that it seems like a logistical nightmare. Though not at that scale, the "Foundation" TV series on Apple TV+ faced a similar problem from the very start due to the nature of the book universe the show is based on. See, "Foundation" is directly adapting a seminal book series of the same name by legendary sci-fi author Isaac Asimov, but that book series is also part of a larger continuity that also includes Asimov's equally legendary and influential "Robot" universe, from which the Will Smith movie "I, Robot" is adapted.

The problem is Asimov didn't plan for his "Foundation" and "Robot" universes to be part of a single continuity. He retroactively combined them years after both stories ended, and had to do a fair amount of retconning to sort of make it all work, bringing characters from one universe into the other and merging their timelines.

When it came time for Josh Friedman and David S. Goyer to adapt "Foundation" into a TV series, they intended to take advantage of the larger universe and the expanded mythology it provided, but there was one problem — they didn't have the rights to the entire story.

"When we were first approached to do 'Foundation,' we were given a document that outlined the characters that we had exclusive rights to," co-creator and showrunner David S. Goyer told /Film ahead of the release of the "Foundation" season 3 finale. "They said that we could reference Demerzel's backstory as a generalization, but we couldn't use the character Daneel and we couldn't name some of the characters from 'I, Robot' by name."

But by season 3, Goyer and his team managed to finally adapt the full extent of the Demerzel story.

Much like the Asimov books combined both the "Robot" and "Foundation" stories through a robot character named R. Daneel Olivaw, so did "Foundation" the TV show placed a robot character at the center of its millennia-long timeline. In the show, it's the character of Demerzel (played by Laura Birn) who is unofficially the true protagonist of the story, serving as the bridge between the Galactic Empire and Foundation era and the ancient era where robots helped humanity reach for the stars and leave planet Earth.

From the very start, "Foundation" has hinted at a much larger backstory for Demerzel than she lets on. According to Goyer, they always wanted to tell the story of Demerzel in connection to the larger history of robotics — how they helped humans build spaceships to reach for the stars, how they helped build the Galactic Empire, and how the Zeroth Law that superseded the Three Laws of Robotics led to robots having such an existential crisis, they went to war and ultimately became extinct over it.

When Goyer found out he didn't have full access to the entirety of the IP, he found a workaround. "We'll be a little coy with some of these references to her in the past," Goyer said, acknowledging that they'd just allude to Demerzel's story but not mention anyone by name, specifically R. Daneel Olivaw, the name Demerzel used to go by before the Robot Wars, as it belonged to the "Robot" series with the rights owned by Fox. But everything changed thanks to a little movie about the baby antichrist.

Goyer was a producer on "The Omen" prequel movie "The First Omen," which was made at Fox. According to the showrunner, he was doing the sound mix for the movie when the head of Fox, Steve Asbell, showed up. And it just so happened Asbell was a fan of "Foundation."

"I said, 'You know, you could help me out here. You could give us a one-time allowance to mention the character of Daneel in season 3 and, for the fans, tie that officially back in,'" Goyer continued. "So he had the business affairs department at Fox do just that and give us permission to do it. But it was a lucky happenstance, because I literally happened to be in a room with the head of Fox, and he was a fan of the show, and sometimes that synchronicity in Hollywood works to your benefit."

"Foundation" will return for a fourth season on Apple TV+.