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Author Topic: Amazon Studios acquires media rights to Warhammer 40K  (Read 1701 times)
Comstar
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on: December 15, 2022, 10:33:38 PM

I miss playing the game.


In other news, looks like we're getting Warhammer 40000: The Amazon TV series

Edit by Trippy: rights include TV and Film, among other things but I put in TV for now

Press Release: https://www.warhammer-community.com/press_releases/amazon-studios-secures-first-of-its-kind-rights-to-warhammer-40000-with-henry-cavill-set-to-star-and-executive-produce-global-franchise/
« Last Edit: January 18, 2023, 07:22:58 PM by Trippy »

Defending the Galaxy, from the Scum of the Universe, with nothing but a flashlight and a tshirt. We need tanks Boo, lots of tanks!
eldaec
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Reply #1 on: December 16, 2022, 07:29:47 AM

I'm pretty sceptical that will happen. 40k is a terrible place to set a TV show.

"People will not assume that what they read on the internet is trustworthy or that it carries any particular ­assurance or accuracy" - Lord Leveson
"Hyperbole is a cancer" - Lakov Sanite
Comstar
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Reply #2 on: December 17, 2022, 06:09:17 AM

GW is exec producing it, so they want it as much as Amazon does.

Hope it's better than the Ultramarine movie was.



Hope is the first step to disappointment.

Defending the Galaxy, from the Scum of the Universe, with nothing but a flashlight and a tshirt. We need tanks Boo, lots of tanks!
NowhereMan
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Reply #3 on: December 17, 2022, 07:11:18 PM

But blessed is the mind too small for doubt.

There are a lot of potential settings that could work for a 40k TV show. Eisenhorn is definitely one of the best book based intros to the universe so every chance it could work as a TV show. Another popular option is Ciaphas Cain, which makes sense since Sharpe worked on TV pretty well but I really think that has limited legs, an Inquisition based show can provide a 'ground level' intro and the show can ramp up the weirdness as much as it wants with Xenos and heresy as they choose.

Cavill understands the fanbase pretty well and despite being in some questionable things I think has a better shot than most at executive producing something decent. GW's Hammer and Bolter stuff has also been decent so they've proven they can actually spot talent and give them room to make something good. If we get a live action Ultramarines move I vote Putin takes Nottingham off the map.

"Look at my car. Do you think that was bought with the earnest love of geeks?" - HaemishM
Riggswolfe
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Reply #4 on: December 29, 2022, 08:11:06 AM

But blessed is the mind too small for doubt.

There are a lot of potential settings that could work for a 40k TV show. Eisenhorn is definitely one of the best book based intros to the universe so every chance it could work as a TV show. Another popular option is Ciaphas Cain, which makes sense since Sharpe worked on TV pretty well but I really think that has limited legs, an Inquisition based show can provide a 'ground level' intro and the show can ramp up the weirdness as much as it wants with Xenos and heresy as they choose.

Cavill understands the fanbase pretty well and despite being in some questionable things I think has a better shot than most at executive producing something decent. GW's Hammer and Bolter stuff has also been decent so they've proven they can actually spot talent and give them room to make something good. If we get a live action Ultramarines move I vote Putin takes Nottingham off the map.

A Gaunt's Ghosts series could be fun. Or a rogue trader series. I just don't want to see a Space Marines series. They're practically aliens themselves and unrelateable as characters IMO. I know lots of people love them but they're my least favorite type of character in 40k.

"We live in a country, where John Lennon takes six bullets in the chest, Yoko Ono was standing right next to him and not one fucking bullet! Explain that to me! Explain that to me, God! Explain it to me, God!" - Denis Leary summing up my feelings about the nature of the universe.
Rendakor
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Reply #5 on: December 29, 2022, 04:31:11 PM

I agree re: Space Marines, and it's always been a problem for me even trying to get into 40k. Caiphas Cain would work fairly well as a show, I think, though I've only read the first book or two. If they insist on Space Marine stuff, they could always do the Horus Heresy.

"i can't be a star citizen. they won't even give me a star green card"
Trippy
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Reply #6 on: December 29, 2022, 06:38:35 PM

Space Marines have the "guys wearing helmets" issue too. Yes it's canon that some Space Marines, particular the leaders, don't wear their helmets for, reasons, but it's still a problem to film if most of your main characters are wearing helmets, much of the time. You can't have everybody faces filmed with the in-helmet "Iron Man" effect.
Phildo
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Reply #7 on: December 29, 2022, 09:34:14 PM

If they're doing something based in the Imperium (and they really should, at least to start) then something about the Inquisition or rogue trader as mentioned would be the best place to start.  Unless they're batshit and jump straight into the Adeptus Mechanicus, because that could be bonkers in a fun way.

e: Cavill as one of those servitor skulls floating around, maybe.
Riggswolfe
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Reply #8 on: December 31, 2022, 09:26:20 AM

If they're doing something based in the Imperium (and they really should, at least to start) then something about the Inquisition or rogue trader as mentioned would be the best place to start.  Unless they're batshit and jump straight into the Adeptus Mechanicus, because that could be bonkers in a fun way.

e: Cavill as one of those servitor skulls floating around, maybe.

The problem with the Inquisition is not all of them are Einhorn. Most of them are utter fanatics. I think an Inquisitor makes a better antagonist than hero of the series unless they want to do some kind of the "The Shield" in space or something.

I think a Rogue Trader would be ideal as it'd give them an excuse to have lots of different adventures on different worlds and maybe even with some Xenos.

"We live in a country, where John Lennon takes six bullets in the chest, Yoko Ono was standing right next to him and not one fucking bullet! Explain that to me! Explain that to me, God! Explain it to me, God!" - Denis Leary summing up my feelings about the nature of the universe.
NowhereMan
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Reply #9 on: January 10, 2023, 10:36:53 AM

The nice thing about the Inquisition is that you can have an inquisitor antagonist for your inquisitor protagonist. You could even pull a fun end of the series twist where it turns out the insane hidebound Puritan inquisitor who has been trying to kill our pragmatic Radical hero over the course of the season is in fact the rational person with a sense of danger and is trying to stop our 'hero' from enacting a Chaos ritual that would pull an entire subsystem into the Warp, using this sacrifice to fuel a weapon to combat a Tyranid fleet or somesuch nonsense.

Really I just hope they make a real effort to keep it grounded in the sense of seeing 'normal' people living under the Imperial system and slowly open us up to the insanity of the universe. Space Marines are awesome but they shouldn't really be protagonists, canonically they're not emotionally developed and they're exceptionally focused on a small number of duties. Without essentially reinventing them for the show you'd be left without much in the way of character drama. On the other hand they'd make great fodder for later action scenes with the stakes for their involvement  built up appropriately. I have some level of trust in Cavill as a producer as someone who's shown they like the source material and have been involved in some pretty solid adaptations of other properties. That bit of optimism out there though, the 40k universe is so vast and the iconic stuff is so unsuited for TV that it's hard to be heavily confident.

"Look at my car. Do you think that was bought with the earnest love of geeks?" - HaemishM
Hoax
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Reply #10 on: January 21, 2023, 09:18:12 AM

There should be 0 Astartes in this at all, if there is 1-5 they should be an elemental force that is mostly in the background killing all the things and dying horrible slow heroic deaths. Used to illustrate how the stakes have risen considerably. Like one appearance of a Deathwatch kill team would be perfect. They should not have many dialogue lines if any at all. They exist so that our characters can run the fuck away from whatever they are doing as fast as they can.

The MC should 100% be a rogue trader in the employ of an Inquisitor and his small team. Two Inquisitors working at cross purposes is a great idea. Show should have 0 orks, at most 1 eldar to provide cryptic warning, advice, assistance type elfy bullshit, any 'nids should be genestealer/lictor unless they want to amp the horror by showing just how helpless normal humans would be vs gargoyles/gaunts/the little worm fuckers.

Corrupt/inept/self serving imperial local gov't officials. Immoral imperial aristocracy. Cults. They could easily put in any low power xeno designed just for the show as a way to introduce the audience to just how unforgiving the imperium of man is towards otherness. Mechanicus up to their own secret shit like always.

I think this is such a difficult IP universe to make a show in. If I hadn't seen Netflix get one season of Altered Carbon right before it went to shit I'd have 0 hope but I guess its possible. I'd honestly expect more from a western Macross/Battletech/Gundam live action property though 40,000 is just a lot. Its heavy and unfun and cruel and there are a lot of moving parts.

A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.
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Typhon
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Reply #11 on: January 21, 2023, 04:27:34 PM

I've never understood how the focus/conversation is on how authoritarian/insane the Imperium is when the chaos gods/demons/cults are a continuous existential threat. 

They literally have emanators to make the local populace lose their shit and turn on everyone. 
All we have is social media and look how long that took to make 40% of the population lose their shit.   

Chaos have actual gods and demons.  The Imperium has a god-emperor that eats millions of human souls (daily?) to keep on keeping on (without whom humanity would be fucked) and genetically engineered super soldiers. 
All we have is an old, mostly incoherent book that disagrees with all the other old mostly incoherent books and we have cults and religions springing up doing horrible shit.

But sure, let's focus how xenophobic the Imperium is... it's not like they are constantly having real super horrifying shit happen virtually every time something 'other' shows up.

The whole world is depressing as shit and complete collapse is always possible at virtually any moment.  The fact that they are surviving at all is impressive.  We'd have our politicians selling us all to Slaanesh for a bigger penis.

With our lens the Imperium is horrible, sure.  But if you lived in that world, every single one of us would be shooting first and asking questions never (or dead).  In that world, the crazy/authoritarian/dystopian is justified.  We're all calm, rational, arm chair philosophers only because there is no verifiable supernatural at all.  Watch a person morph into a demon right in front of you and I imagine that philosophy and rules of engagement are going to be pretty low.

... sorry, I'm high and typing ... happened.   Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?  LOL, I can't wait to read this tomorrow
HaemishM
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Reply #12 on: January 21, 2023, 10:14:19 PM

In that light, it certainly illustrates the mentality that would cause an authoritarian leadership to come to power.   why so serious?

NowhereMan
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Reply #13 on: January 22, 2023, 03:47:49 AM

It's part of the 2000AD style satirical origins of 40k. We get a vision of just how horrible a universe needs to be to actually justify the kind of authoritarian horror fascism desires. The Imperium is actually justified in its actions in the sense of the threat that Chaos represents and the utterly malevolent Xenos (Orks and Tyranids along with a list of non-faction races like Enslavers) that only want to destroy humanity while also presenting insidious threats e.g. Genestealer cults. It's an insanely exaggerated view of a universe that presents threats inside and out on the kind of level that justifies having stuff like an Inquisition answerable to nobody and empowered to exterminate whole planets. The only major difference between real world fascism and the Imperium is that the historical 'golden age' they look back to is actually the start of their own Empire rather than an earlier one. What we would think of as humanity's golden age, that point when we are a post-singularity species with access to incredibly technological marvels and able to essentially colonise the universe at will for 40k was the 'Dark Age of Technology' because it resulted in AI rebellions and eventually a total collapse of our interstellar empire. The Emperor's project emerged as a response to this species wide trauma.

There's a whole now developed backstory now introducing an element of tragedy in the sense that in lore now GW's Black Library have introduced other alternative directions humanity could have gone in but instead the Emperor's single minded arrogance drove us down a path of isolation, xenophobia and ultimately stagnation that seems almost inevitably to lead to destruction. It should be noted that obviously this wasn't the intention, the Imperium can justify it's policies and religious insanity but it also only serves to slow that destruction. Nobody is willing to change course because of the dangers that represents but the course humanity is on is one that almost certainly ends in its destruction. The Imperium aren't the good guys, they are most definitely bad guys. It doesn't mean they can't justify their actions, that's how horrible the 40k universe is, but it doesn't make them good. Which is a level of nuance that makes it far too easy for actual racists and fascists to declare the Imperium awesome and start screaming all their actual beliefs dressed up in 40k language and make it seem cool to kids that think they're being ironic or Roleplaying and start internalising some of those ideas because critical thinking (in the more literary critique sense) isn't a widely acquired skill.

That will probably be the biggest critique of a 40k show online (assuming it's not just total garbage). Any attempt to portray the Imperium as anything but ultimately good will get screamed off as SJW woke trash. If they really succeed, hopefully we get a Chaos cult leader, a Radical inquisitor and a Puritanical Inquisitor in a set of overlapping competition around some Warp Macguffin and ultimately see that all three of them are people who think they're doing what's best for the world and are still irredeemably evil. Hell go full hog and have the ultimate hero of the show be an Eversor assassin who's been a background monster everyone assumes is some Chaos beast that kills those three thus saving a sector/planet from being sacrificed to Chaose/used as a lure for a Tyranid fleet/Exterminatused.

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Ashamanchill
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Reply #14 on: January 22, 2023, 08:54:40 AM

I could have been passibly psyched for this if it wasn't Amazon doing it. I got scorched on WoT, then RoP. I think I'm going to wait for this one to prove itself. Unless there is a story segment somehow devoted to the Tyranids. No worthless dialogue. Just one Hive Fleet's wacky adventures to devour a couple planets. (In all seriousness Genestealer uprisings could be worth something narratively.)

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HaemishM
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Reply #15 on: January 22, 2023, 09:54:23 AM

The 40k universe has no good guys, only "those who will make the tough decisions that happen to cause an entire planet to die" and "the dead people on said planet." It's great lore for a world where war is constant and every faction can be reasonably justified to be matched up against every other faction. As a narrative setting, though, it's absolutely depressing and shitty. I don't really expect the showrunners to give us anything approaching the kind of subtle nuance that would make it compelling, and I don't expect we'll get good enough CGI to make all the battle scenes worth sitting through shitty drama with a cast full of unlikable characters.

Typhon
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Reply #16 on: January 22, 2023, 03:04:17 PM

 awesome, for real My post was not as horribly rambling as I assumed it would be, so I'm relieved about that.  I think the point of my post was, the WH40K world is SO fucked up, why does anyone even try to measure them by our standards.  "Good" is pretty much, not an agent of chaos.

And then I finally remember that all this back story was pretty much just tacked onto figures that were a part of a table top game and the joke is on me for even thinking about whether the lore or the critques make sense... and then I say, "lol, wait, their making a movie/series"?

:) but Haemish said it better.
eldaec
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Reply #17 on: January 22, 2023, 03:47:57 PM

I'm not sure I'd want to try to write anything for 40k unless you went super small scale. Space hulk, the TV show maybe.

Warhammer fantasy would have a lot more promise.

"People will not assume that what they read on the internet is trustworthy or that it carries any particular ­assurance or accuracy" - Lord Leveson
"Hyperbole is a cancer" - Lakov Sanite
Phildo
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Reply #18 on: January 22, 2023, 05:05:57 PM

Cavill plays Custodes, so...
Ashamanchill
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Reply #19 on: January 24, 2023, 10:29:17 AM

I'm not sure I'd want to try to write anything for 40k unless you went super small scale.

I'm telling you, we follow a Hive fleet, but with this same format as a 90s sitcom. Tell me you can't see this: 4 Hive Tyrants sitting around in a biomass shop, complaining about the foibles of the planets they have just devoured.

A poster signed by Richard Garriot, Brad McQuaid, Marc Jacobs and SmerricK Dart.  Of course it would arrive a couple years late, missing letters and a picture but it would be epic none the less. -Tmon
Khaldun
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Reply #20 on: January 24, 2023, 11:11:32 AM

Kind of seems to me you can only do this the same way doing The Black Company would have to go--as the stories of individuals that you might care about in a world where none of their goals or actions are things you can support, identify with or root for. Takes a delicate touch.
Ashamanchill
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Reply #21 on: January 24, 2023, 11:29:48 AM

If I'm them, I'm just stealing the format of Riot's Arcane and crossing out Piltover and writing in Hive City. I do think there is an appetite for bastards doing bastardly deeds in a bastardly fashion, but I do agree that it is Amazon, and bringing the show to an audience outside of neckbeards who cosplay as Nazis the death Korps of Krieg would require a more traditional morality framing. I brought up Arcane because, not every Imperial citizen is born with a burn the Heretics t-shirt. Show us how they become that way, and maybe how and if any resist it.

A poster signed by Richard Garriot, Brad McQuaid, Marc Jacobs and SmerricK Dart.  Of course it would arrive a couple years late, missing letters and a picture but it would be epic none the less. -Tmon
Typhon
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Reply #22 on: January 24, 2023, 02:15:49 PM

I think you could do that with the pestilent.  As disgusting as they are, if I remember correctly, they are all kind of nice to each other.  That would at least be funny.  Really hard to watch though.
NowhereMan
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Reply #23 on: January 27, 2023, 02:05:53 AM

I think Eisenhorn or even Ravenor would be a decent basis for a mini-series. It's small scale but high stakes and takes a reasonable path to start you with 'dystopian future space cop' type framing to 'Fantasy level powers clashing with the fate of billions in the balance'. The overall arc of a Radical inquisitor as pretty much doomed to go over the edge at some point is also a fun subtext to have in with the depressing nature of the universe, although the direction the latest trilogy is going in is probably not one that you'd be able to easily communicate to someone not deep in the lore.

That or following a Guard regiment Band of Brothers style could work, I think it would be difficult to handle world building and certainly you miss out on all non-military aspects of the world (although admittedly in 40k that's still a lot of the in-universe). I'd actually like to see them include some Eldar Harlequins as the Xenos element, they'd work well with a limited budget as you can have 90% of their presence being something happening suddenly off-screen or weird disembodied voices. They provide both a plot driver and don't necessarily need to do much beyond be annoying for most of it.

"Look at my car. Do you think that was bought with the earnest love of geeks?" - HaemishM
Sky
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Reply #24 on: January 27, 2023, 06:59:26 AM

A Space Hulk horror movie ala Alien would be pretty cool.
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