Amazon Studios has the rights to adapt Warhammer 40,000 into “series, movies, etc.” The project will be executive produced and starred by Henry Cavill. Cavill called it “a Warhammer Cinematic Universe” on his Instagram. Expect multiple stories. Assuming Cavill isn’t playing all the parts (one-man fringe theater productions I’ve actually seen), he can play one character from the entire setting. So who should it be?
The obvious thing to do with 40K is talk about the Space Marines. The setting’s iconic visuals are young men wearing helmets that look like medieval siege structures and shoulder pads the size of home sedans. Hard. They’re indoctrinated, monks, barely human, and they exist only to fight. There is not much variety there. First attempt to make 40K film, direct to DVD Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 movies (opens in new tab) Starting in 2010, I had a hard time distinguishing between the grizzled cast.
That said, when Marvel acquired the rights to run 40K in comic book form, they knocked it out of the park. Marneus Calger (opens in new tab) It was about Ultramarine, which lacks the oversized personality of the chapter like Technoviking’s Space Wolf. provided a human character for Pages of gory ultra-violence were balanced by adepts accompanying Calgar who could react to the daily horrors of the Marines. Even though it could definitely work.
Given that Amazon’s 40K will be many people’s introduction to Games Workshop’s gothic industrial science fantasy setting, another possibility is a complete new character and storyline. It is intended to pick up what used to be in different permutations. very Different permutations—and keep them digestible. This is an almost impossible task. The universe is vast, as you’ll notice, and Warhammer 40,000 embraces multiple alien empires and an entire alternate dimension of ghostly reality, as well as a human empire that’s itself unimaginably vast.
One option is an episode series that looks at the settings of individual slices. Have Cavill play a captain or rogue trader with a motley crew and send them across the galaxy to fight and die in space.Watch Warhammer TV Anime kill command (opens in new tab)you can watch it for free on YouTube.
The first time our imaginary show crew encountered one of the more fantasy elements of the setting – Aeldari, who are basically space elves, or orcs, who are literally space orcs, or straight demons. – may look like. While harsh to new viewers, a feature of serialized shows is that they can run horror episodes, comedy episodes, etc., and then return to the story they were talking about before. Safely quarantined between intros and credits.
Turning Warhammer 40,000 into a version of Star Trek where everyone is hard bastards and it looks like the ship exploded in a Catholic factory doesn’t really light my fire. Yet another spaceship show. You don’t need 40K licenses to mass produce . If you want something that definitively feels like 40K, the easiest way to do it is to take one of the stories that defined it. And hey, if you paid for the whole universe, why not get the best of it?
One of the most popular 40K novel series is the Eisenhorn saga. With the rights acquired by Big Light Productions in 2019, the adaptation was very obvious and has already been done.
That work may have died quietly in the meantime, in which case it could be available again or included in the “rights to the universe for series, movies, etc.” secured by Amazon Studios. If so, Cavill would make a great Eisenhorn. He has experience playing the detective in Enola Holmes, but Gregor Eisenhorn in the smileless horror hunter is actually another role for Cavill. Close to Geralt of Rivia.
From a series of books about Imperial Guard Commissars who have seen him mistaken for an actual hero and turned into a propaganda weapon in an attempt to cover up his cowardice, fans see another role Cavill deserves going to Ciaphas Cain. Cain’s square-jawed appearance and knack for surviving the impossible make him too soft for the military and really embody the Empire’s grotesque ideal of harsh self-sacrifice. makes him look like the perfect poster for the Empire, even if he’s afraid to die.
You can clearly see a man who looks like Cavill being mistaken for an ideal, and in smaller roles like Humphrey in Stardust, he’s demonstrated an ability to switch to comic twitter when necessary.Ciaphas The problem with Cain’s story is that after a promising start, the series starts treating Cain as a guy who just thinks he’s a coward, and acts like a hero when the chips drop and the push comes. At 40K, chips are always going down and pushing is always coming.
It’s also very formulaic, both in the plot and how often the same phrases are repeated. What he would have done had Cain known how often his palms were tingling, smelling the approach of an unwashed aide before meeting him, or how everything would change You can make a decent drinking game from mentioning that you wouldn’t have finished out.
Of course, the adaptation doesn’t require his repetitive narration or transformation into an unkillable badass who happens to be a little practical. wouldn’t like it, but taking the basic concepts of Siafus Kane’s story and making something better out of them is a fun way to introduce the setting, and shows that 40K isn’t always just rigorous. Able to have a good sense of humor.
What was not made clear in the Games Workshop announcement was whether Amazon’s deal included Horus Heresy, a prequel series set 10,000 years before Warhammer 40,000, and GW as a separate If the deal involves Horus Heresy, that changes things. First of all, it opens up the possibility of an enduring fancasting of Cavill as Emperor of Mankind.
I can’t say I agree. The Emperor’s psychic abilities mean that he looks different to different people, and can look the way they want him to. , golden, or basically any skin color that isn’t Cavill, but belongs to an actor who could if given the chance to play the role…important.
And there are plenty of more fitting roles in Horus Heresy, which features a ridiculously sized cast. These experimental demigods served as the genetic source for the Space Marines, but unlike their typically stoic descendants, the Primarchs are more exaggerated than real, and their moods are legendary. A mythical character. I’d rather see Cavill as one of them. Although.
Similar to Ciaphas Cain, the adaptation offers an opportunity to fix problems with the book. For the Horus Heretics, their greatest sin is their numbers. The base series had 54 of his books, which were later rebranded and continued as The Siege of Terra. This is his 62 books, not counting his 17 novels in his Primarchs spin-off series and his four anthologies, or audio his dramas, novellas, graphic his novels.
When the story behind this landmark event was first detailed in the 1988 rulebook Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness, it took up three pages. Without Art, it would have fit in two.
Horus Heresy certainly has enough material to make a decent TV show. Much shorter than a book. (If you play all audiobooks in succession, solid moon (opens in new tab).) Once you’ve read the first three Horus Heresy books, it’s a tight trilogy worth your time, and you can imagine what the rest of the series would have looked like. Instead, these books were marketed as deluxe, niche products, becoming bestsellers and expanding the series more than it needed to. You can get a few seasons of drama from a war that turned into a fascist theocracy.
It is the tragedy of the Fall of Horus that the novel has had trouble understanding. His name is in the title and we all know what happens to him. And it’s hard to see that he’s a beloved politician, that he’s a general in an early story, before a preordained betrayal. Now’s the ideal role for the man who’s done it. I see it