According to a statement in Games Workshop’s latest financial report, Amazon has recruited the film production company United Artists, and the renowned horror screenwriter and director Mike Flanagan, to its project to create films and TV series set in the Warhammer 40k universe. “Initial outlines” are complete, and Flanagan “should soon be moving on to script”.
The horror maestro’s involvement indicates that Amazon will adapt the colossal Warhammer 40k license not as a military epic, but as gothic horror and mystery. Flanagan’s film and television career is packed with original horror movies, adaptations of Stephen King novels, and gothic horror TV series, particularly the recent Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House.
It makes sense to adapt Warhammer 40k this way. Most horror, mystery, or detective stories in Warhammer 40k take place on the ‘home front’, which is far cheaper to film than any of the massive warzones depicted in the tabletop game. Such a series could effectively introduce the Imperium of Man to new viewers, establishing just how strange and broken human civilization has become by the 41st millennium, even without the threat of xenos invasion or chaos corruption.
When the news of the Warhammer 40k film and TV project was first revealed, with Superman and Witcher star Henry Cavill front and center, 40k fans immediately began speculating as to which existing character he might play, and what kind of story he might star in. Cavill would be a great fit for Ibram Gaunt, hero of the Sharpe-in-space military fiction series Gaunts Ghosts; any number of Space Marines and Primarchs from the epic space opera of the Horus Heresy books; or the brooding Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn, effectively James Bond in a Lovecraft novel; to point out just a few of the most popular suggestions. Of those, Eisenhorn now looks like the most likely option.
But the 40k universe has plenty of scope for character driven gothic horror featuring original characters. More mundane characters might be even better at providing a point of view for an audience encountering the secret horrors lurking in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium for the very first time, compared to the hardened and cynical Eisenhorn. Given the strength of Flanagan’s original work, that could be an equally excellent series.
If you have predictions about what we might see in the 40k series, or favorite films or series that Flanagan wrote or directed, come and share your thoughts in the Wargamer Discord.
Source: Wargamer
