Deal with GW/Amazon signed

[Waaagh?]

Yeah it was pretty obvious Valraks video was clickbait nonsense. That's not how production agreements/contract drafting works at all.......but hey anything for those clicks. 

[Marshal Reinhard]

34 minutes ago, Joe said:

I would earnestly wait and see what the end result is from Fallout before drawing a line towards what we might be able to expect from Warhammer.

While the trailer for fallout maybe does look good, I have a lot of misgivings on what was shown and revealed as it showed definate cracks in the understanding of the lore of that universe. Hardly surprising as the current stewards of that IP, Bethesda, never actually understood it either. Combine it with what was pretty much a complete trashfire with RoP and there's ample reason to be concerned given their track record.

 

Thankfully though GW does understand their own IP and presumably so does Cavill, so hoperfully there'll be enough safeguards that this turns out alright, Emperor willing.

[Nineswords]

11 minutes ago, Waaagh? said:

Yeah it was pretty obvious Valraks video was clickbait nonsense. That's not how production agreements/contract drafting works at all.......but hey anything for those clicks. 

 

I was linked to the previous video, and now his update which was hastily recorded. I now know why I choose to not watch Warhammer-related YouTube videos. Absolute attention seeking nonsense.

[Lord_Ikka]

Just now, Nineswords said:

 

I was linked to the previous video, and now his update which was hastily recorded. I now know why I choose to not watch Warhammer-related YouTube videos. Absolute attention seeking nonsense.

Ha. I avoid 40k YouTubers as well. My brother has come to me several times asking about lore questions that some YouTuber either misread, misrepresented, or just flat-out repeated a fan theory as lore. I've heard several are pretty good, but I prefer to do my own looking up via codices, novels, and official in-universe lore rather than hope someone on YT got it right. 

 

Right now the movies/series depend on GW implementing as strict of a level of lore oversight as they have with most of their video game licenses- they've done a decent job there in reigning in possible non-canon lore even though the end products might still be iffy from a product perspective. 

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Lord_Ikka said:

Ha. I avoid 40k YouTubers as well. My brother has come to me several times asking about lore questions that some YouTuber either misread, misrepresented, or just flat-out repeated a fan theory as lore. I've heard several are pretty good, but I prefer to do my own looking up via codices, novels, and official in-universe lore rather than hope someone on YT got it right. 

 

Arbitor Ian is one of the few channels I watch for Lore...  I avoid all the clickbait nonsence.

[Marshal Rohr]

25 minutes ago, Waaagh? said:

Yeah it was pretty obvious Valraks video was clickbait nonsense. That's not how production agreements/contract drafting works at all.......but hey anything for those clicks. 

Clickbait or a master of 7 Dimensional chess getting some news from the stone?

[TrawlingCleaner]

=][= Alrighty folks, we'll move on from talking about Youtubers now as the topic of discussion is GW and Amazon signing their deal =][=

[Emperor Ming]

As long as they keep the amazon people away from script writing.....

 

No body wants another rings of power disaster

[Nineswords]

42 minutes ago, TrawlingCleaner said:

=][= Alrighty folks, we'll move on from talking about Youtubers now as the topic of discussion is GW and Amazon signing their deal =][=

 

Apologies, I specifically referencing the two videos related to this piece of news.

For what it's worth, I had hoped Frank Spotnik's adaption of Abnett's Eisenhorn books would see the light of day, but it appears the specific scripts have yet to be decided on. As a casual consumer of streaming services, it appears Amazon could be in competition with AppleTV to snap up series' based on popular SF franchises, and Warhammer 40k is no exception. 

My question now is - animated series, or will we see a big budget live adaption?

[Marshal Reinhard]

If they do live action, for the love of the god emperor, focus on human characters. Eisenhorn's xenos is probably the best example that could be chosen as a first project. Human intrigue, one of the best introductions to the setting and keeps things relatively grounded. Xenos, chaos and astartes do show up but pretty sparingly. Again keeps things grounded.

 

If animated, all bets are off. Nearly anyway.

 

Just stay away from the Horus Heresy. It's too big to handle.

[TrawlingCleaner]

There are a good few well recieved Amazon shows that are based on existing IP too: Man in the High Castle, Good Omens, Reacher, The Boys, Invincible, Vox Machina and the closest to 40k is the Expanse (they made seasons 4-6, some of the better rated). Yuck, that's all the defending of Amazon I can muster

 

Taking things straight from books and trying to mash them into a visual format often does not work. Lord of the Rings triology, famously, is very different from the original source material because a lot of the books really don't translate well but a passionate team behind the films created something that feels like the books. In the lead up to the Fellowship, lots of fans were adamant it would be an awful set of films from a relatively unknown film maker who made very low budget, whacky films.

Cavil being a fan of the setting is great, it's good to have passionate people behind the the project and that know their stuff. But they've also got to balance that with making something that actually works in a visual format and that people outside of the current fan base would actually consume. From what I understand, one of the reasons that Cavil left the Witcher was that he clashed often with Producers over their departures from the books. Personally, I'm a bit wary of this happening again or too much dabbling from Amazon's side

 

We're at least 5 or 6 year out anyways!

[Petitioner's City]

2 hours ago, Marshal Reinhard said:

While the trailer for fallout maybe does look good, I have a lot of misgivings on what was shown and revealed as it showed definate cracks in the understanding of the lore of that universe. Hardly surprising as the current stewards of that IP, Bethesda, never actually understood it either. Combine it with what was pretty much a complete trashfire with RoP and there's ample reason to be concerned given their track record.

 

Thankfully though GW does understand their own IP and presumably so does Cavill, so hoperfully there'll be enough safeguards that this turns out alright, Emperor willing.

 

Have you actually read the Variety fair article which accompanied it? Like I feel people really really misunderstand how Media works, and how things are made

 

Quote

BY ANTHONY BREZNICAN
NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Fallout often looks like the distant past, but it’s really the far-off future—and, actually, it’s the end of life as we know it.

In the new series, debuting on Amazon’s Prime Video on April 12, a nuclear war breaks out across Earth in the year 2077—which is (or was) an era of robots, hover cars, and a deep and abiding nostalgia for the America of the 1940s. Everything from the clothes, to the entertainment, to the vehicles mimic the look of that bygone age, albeit with a sci-fi tilt. That retro-futurist aesthetic was one of the charms of the mega-selling video game series that inspired the show.

 

Mass extinction is just the starting point for Fallout, which was developed for TV by Westworld creators (and husband and wife) Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. After the incendiary mushroom clouds, the story flashes forward 219 years. How did humanity fair over those blighted two centuries? Lucy, one of the lead characters (played by Yellowjackets star Ella Purnell), has no clue. She has lived her entire life inside a subterranean vault, where every need and want has been satisfied while generations and generations await the day when it is safe to surface.

 

When a crisis forces Lucy to venture above on a rescue mission, she finds that the planet above remains a hellscape crawling with giant insects, voracious mutant animal “abominations,” and a human population of sunbaked miscreants who make the manners, morals, and hygiene of the gunslinging Old West look like Downton Abbey. “The games are about the culture of division and haves and have-nots that, unfortunately, have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades,” Nolan tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive first look.

Lucy is nice, but Lucy is naive. In the Fallout universe, the human beings fortunate enough to ride out the apocalypse in underground communities only had that option available to them because they had money. Forcing doe-eyed Lucy out into this sadistic, Darwinian remnant of civilization opens the door for Fallout to engage in some social satire as well as action and adventure. Like HBO’s hit The Last of Us, which was also adapted from a blockbuster video game, the end of the world offers a rich opportunity to comment on the real one.

 

“We get to talk about that in a wonderful, speculative-fiction way,” says Nolan, who directed the first three episodes. “I think we’re all looking at the world and going, ‘God, things seem to be heading in a very, very frightening direction.’”

As Westworld demonstrated, Nolan has a fascination with the mix of mythology and psychology that make up human nature. His characters typically believe one thing about themselves while behaving in a radically different way under pressure. He previously created the series Person of Interest, about a world in which crimes and terrorism can be predicted in advance, and cowrote such films as The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and Interstellar with his filmmaker brother, Christopher Nolan. Jonathan—who goes by Jonah—is fond of plunging his fictional test subjects into situations that unsettle their deeply held beliefs.

“So many of us have such naive ideas, even now, about everyone else’s experiences, and it’s one of the things I love about America. It’s this giant, manic collection of different experiences, different points of view,” Nolan says. Desperation only exacerbates those fissures in Fallout, as Purnell’s do-gooder soon discovers. “Lucy is charming and plucky and strong…and then you see she’s confronted with the reality of, hey, maybe the supposedly virtuous things you grew up with are not necessarily that virtuous. If they are virtuous, they’re couched in a circumstantial virtuousness. It’s a luxury virtue. You have your point of view because you never ran out of food, right? You guys were able to share everything—because you had enough to share.”

 

The Fallout series tracks “her collision with the hard reality of other people’s experiences and what happened to the people who, frankly, were left behind, left to die,” Nolan says.

Fallout is leavened by the same twisted sense of humor that made the video games so appealing. The ubiquitous logo of Lucy’s people, the Vault Dwellers, is a winking cartoon who perpetually flashes a giant smile and the thumbs-up sign. This “Vault Boy” iconography originated in the games and was intended as an ironic, tone-deaf contrast to the hardscrabble existence of those who endure on the surface. Nolan and Joy’s determination to maintain that mordant comedy was the key to making the world work as a series, says game-maker Todd Howard, the director of 2008’s Fallout 3 and 2015’s Fallout 4 and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, which developed the franchise.

 

“We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence,” says Howard, who’s also an executive producer of the show. “Look, Fallout can be very dramatic, and dark, and postapocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink…. I think they threaded that needle really well on the TV show.”

Vault Boy not only appears in the show, but the imagery even gets an origin story (which we won’t spoil here). “That was something that they came up with that’s just really smart,” Howard says.
Fans of the games should know that everything in the series is officially part of Fallout lore, and Bethesda was careful to make sure the scripts could coexist with previous storylines from the gaming titles. “We view what’s happening in the show as canon,” says Howard. “That’s what’s great, when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion.” He admits to being envious of some of the TV show’s interpretations and additions: “I sort of looked at it like, ‘Ah, why didn’t we do that?’”

 

The prospect for a Fallout film or TV show has been in the ether for years, but Howard was always resistant to it. “I’ve taken countless meetings with producers, or heard pitches, and nothing ever felt like the right fit,” he says. “Or maybe I was [wondering] a little, How will it affect the franchise? I took a very cautious approach.”
Howard is an admirer of Interstellar, which he cites as one of the inspirations for Bethesda’s latest game, Starfield, a massive, open-world story that allows players to build their own characters and starships to explore more than a thousand planets scattered throughout the Milky Way. “The movies he’s worked on are some of my favorites. And I’d heard that he liked video games, and had an eye for that stuff,” Howard says. “I’d said to somebody—and I won’t say who—but I was taking a meeting with another producer, and said: ‘Before I talk to other people, I want to hear that Jonah Nolan says he’ll never do it.’”

That led to a conversation between the two—and Nolan actually was interested. He and Joy acquired the rights through their Kilter Films production company, then set about inventing new characters and trials and tribulations with executive producers and writers Geneva Robertson-Dworet (cowriter of 2019’s Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (a veteran of The Office, Portlandia, and Silicon Valley), who serve as Fallout’s showrunners.

Howard says he and Bethesda were sold when Nolan and his team proposed building an entirely new story within the existing realm Fallout. “I did not want to do an interpretation of an existing story we did,” Howard says. “That was the other thing—a lot of pitches were, you know, ‘This is the movie of Fallout 3…’ I was like, ‘Yeah, we told that story.’ I don’t have a lot of interest seeing those translated. I was interested in someone telling a unique Fallout story. Treat it like a game. It gives the creators of the series their own playground to play in.”

 

As the Fallout show progresses, Lucy’s journey intersects with the two other lead characters, who are new to the universe. One of them is the wannabe soldier Maximus (Aaron Moten, the tragic Petey from The Night Of), who grew up aboveground but, like Lucy, was also raised in a cloistered “family” of sorts—a brutal collective of warriors called the Brotherhood of Steel.

“It’s a little bit of the Marine Corps. It’s a little bit of the Knights Templar. It’s this kind of weird fusion,” Nolan says. “In the absence of a federal government, you just had all this military hardware lying around. Who would get it, and how would they maintain control of it?” The answer is the Brotherhood, which Nolan describes as being fueled by “a mutated version of patriotism, religion, loyalty, and fraternity.”

Their control comes from the battalions of super-soldier knights in shining power armor, who stalk the landscape enforcing the Brotherhood’s notion of order. Maximus fills a role that’s straight out of medieval times. “He’s a squire,” Nolan says. “This is a drawing on the classic Arthurian Knight legends where life was cheap and you had a squire as long as they were useful. They had to prove their worth, they had to prove their valor and their strength, and if they didn’t, they were kind of cast aside.”

 

Max serves the giant, seemingly robotic figure of his master with the same naive faith that Lucy has in her Vault Dwellers. But unlike her, he has a cynical sense of self-preservation that leads him to not always behave honorably or heroically. “One of the things we're trying to gently sidestep here is that kind of binary thinking, like, ‘They’re the good guys, or the bad guys,’” Nolan says. “Whoever the good guys and the bad guys were, they destroyed the whole world. So now we’re in a much more gray area.”

Fallout’s world is filled by a sprawling ensemble, including Kyle MacLachlan as Lucy’s father, the “overseer” of Vault 33, which essentially makes him the mayor of their hometown, while Homeland's Sarita Choudhury is a different kind of leader in this world, willing to sacrifice anything for her band of people. Moisés Arias (who as a child played Rico on Hannah Montana) costars as Lucy’s inquisitive brother. Michael Emerson, who starred in Nolan’s Person of Interest and is best known as hatch-inhabitant Benjamin Linus on Lost, stays aboveground this time, playing an enigmatic researcher named Wilzig. Most of the disparate parties are “chasing an artifact that has the potential to radically change the power dynamic in this world,” as Nolan puts it.

 

Then there is Fallout’s wild card, its third lead figure—the sinister bounty hunter known as The Ghoul (played by Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight’s Walton Goggins). The Ghoul is a gruesomely scarred roughrider who has a code of honor, but also a ruthless streak. He is the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly all rolled into one. He’s also quite a survivor—having existed for hundreds of years. The show occasionally flashes back to the human being he once was, a father and husband named Cooper Howard, before the nuclear holocaust turned the world into a cinder and transformed him into an undead, noseless sharp-shooting fiend.

In the Fallout games, Ghouls are typically cannon fodder, mindless zombies whose bodies have been mutated by radiation. The Ghoul is a legend, distinct among his kind for his cleverness and cunning. There’s still something of Cooper Howard, the person he used to be within this desiccated form. “Walton’s equally adept at drama and comedy, which is so difficult,” Nolan says. “There is a chasm in time and distance between who this guy was and who he’s become, which for me creates an enormous dramatic question: What happened to this guy? So we’ll walk backwards into that.”

He compares The Ghoul to the poet Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, someone in this hellish landscape who knows its full scope, origin, and secrets. “He becomes our guide and our protagonist in that [older] world, even as we understand him to be the antagonist at the end of the world,” Nolan says.
The games have already created a template for how creatures like him look, but that was dialed back for Goggins’s character. For one, he’s smarter than the average Ghoul. He would naturally have a different physique and face. But there’s also a practical reason to make him less Ghoul-ish. “You have to be extremely careful with it when you’re putting a full appliance on someone’s face, because you hired that actor for a reason,” Nolan says. “Their face is their instrument. [You want] the tiny little expressions and changes that they make.”

 

Prosthetics designer Vincent Van Dyke (who worked on Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Killers of the Flower Moon) devised the look of the Ghoul. “I need to be able to see Walton and his performance, he needs to look like a Ghoul from the game, and he needs to be kind of hot,” Nolan says.
That last part turned out to be literally true. “The first day we were shooting with Walton in makeup, he comes to set and I’m looking at him, like, ‘Walton…are you crying?’ He just had sweat leaking out of the prosthetics under his eyes because it was so hot.”
If Lucy is the innocent of the show, then the Ghoul is her polar opposite—damaged and hardened by his centuries of endless life in a state of near-death. “He’s got a lot of mileage on him, but he’s still got a swagger and kind of a charm to him,” Nolan says.

Like its antiheroes, the world of Fallout has to maintain an appeal despite its grim aspects. “It’s a dark world in many ways,” Nolan says. “But the games were fun to play, fun to explore, and I think that was a mandate for us: to make sure that it was enjoyable to spend time in this universe.”

 

It's really good to explore this in the context of an article from spring in Hollywood Reporter about how Amazon under Salke often defaults to producers, like the Nolans, who bring content to them.

 

Quote

What generates some of the frustration that sources cite in dealings with Amazon is that Salke, who was previously president of NBC Entertainment, seems to be pursuing conflicting goals. Despite her assertion that Amazon is “a home for talent,” insiders say the mandate is increasingly not on finding the kind of curated hit that defines HBO, but more middle-of-the-road, meat-and-potatoes shows like Jack Reacher. “We’re so desperate right now for safe hits,” an Amazon exec says. (Netflix has also been pursuing broader material.)

But at the same time, current and former Amazon executives say Salke has a pattern of “chasing what she perceives as hot,” as one insider puts it. That person cites as examples paying a premium for Daisy Jones because of the Witherspoon connection, or making a Dead Ringers series, based on the 1988 David Cronenberg film, that came with Rachel Weisz attached. Salke makes deals with auteur talent to “deliver Jack Reacher results,” says an Amazon veteran. “But they don’t.”

Amazon recently renewed The Peripheral, a sci-fi drama from Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy that cost close to $175 million for eight episodes (sources say their final eight-episode season of Westworld at HBO cost about $140 million). Amazon has ordered six additional hours of The Peripheral despite what sources say has been lukewarm audience engagement. “It probably should have been canceled,” says an insider. “But they made a megadeal and the political capital they would lose with Lisa and Jonah would be too great. And they have other shows coming.” Fallout, the next show from Nolan and Joy, is also “extremely expensive,” says a source. 

 

Nolan and Joy’s deal has been worth at least $20 million a year since they signed on in 2019. One insider calls the Nolan deal the worst example of Salke’s mantra that Amazon is “a home for talent.’” He adds: “We cede decisions to powerful producers. We hold the line on other producers who do great work for us.” Nolan and Joy declined to comment.

 

Some rich Amazon deals have failed to produce anything at all. In the wake of serving as an executive producer on Them, Lena Waithe got a two-year deal worth $8 million a year that yielded nothing; in November 2021, she moved her banner to HBO Max. 

 

And in September 2019, Amazon announced a deal with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who had just swept up six Emmys for the second season of Fleabag. The plan was for Waller-Bridge to collaborate with Donald Glover on a Mr. and Mrs. Smith series, based on the 2005 film. 

 

But within a few months, Waller-Bridge departed the show due to clashing creative styles. Her three-year deal, at $20 million a year, bore no fruit, yet Amazon recently renewed it, announcing that Waller-Bridge would write (but not star in) a Tomb Raider series. Some Amazon insiders have questioned how much she will contribute to the project, noting that Amazon has been seeking a showrunner to help write and oversee it. 

 

The low-key Sanders bristles a little at the assertion. “Phoebe has not only fully embraced Tomb Raider and I think is feeling very committed to it, but she’s in a writers room right now working on it,” he says. Waller-Bridge is developing other material for the streamer as well, he adds, “She’s a perfectionist, so she absolutely wants to make sure that what she does is great and right, but she’s proven that when she does deliver, she delivers.” Waller-Bridge declined to comment.

 

But a showrunner with considerable experience at Amazon sees it differently: “They don’t learn from their mistakes. They [say], ‘We can’t do any more deals like that.’ You turn around and they’re right back to — the impolite term is ‘star-:cuss:ing.'” For creative executives at the studio, the result has been exasperation. “They say, ‘We don’t want to buy from outside studios,’” says a former Amazon exec. “Then packages come and they buy everything that comes through the door, and our development is thrown out.” 

 

Quote

Some of the confusion around Amazon may arise from conflicting goals at the top. Mike Hopkins, Amazon’s senior vice president for Prime Video & Amazon Studios, is a seasoned business executive and a veteran of Sony and Hulu but does not come from the creative side. A top industry executive who dealt with him at Hulu calls him “a seemingly egoless, laid-back, efficient manager.” A former Amazon executive says Hopkins is a “very intelligent, very calm and collected leader, but all he seems to care about is the bottom line. He doesn’t understand a lot about production because he doesn’t come from that.” Hopkins declined to comment.

 

Salke is known as a charismatic leader who has “a great touch around talent,” says an agent. But one long-standing complaint is that she can be hard to reach and unresponsive to texts or emails. “I really like Jen,” says an executive whose company has done repeat business with Amazon. “When you get her, she’s really engaged. She’s obviously spread thin, but if you actually get her, you can get a pretty clear answer.” That issue might only be exacerbated as, in the past year, Salke has taken on responsibility for MGM’s film and television studios, as well as marketing oversight.

On the fundamental issue of money, Hopkins and Salke were destined to clash. “Her strategy is to get whatever seems hot. Mike’s vision was to cut costs on shows and get football,” says a former insider. In 2021, Amazon became the first streamer to make an exclusive deal with the NFL, signing an 11-year pact for exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football at $1 billion per season. Amazon’s sports chief, Jay Marine, told staff in a September note that the launch game produced “the biggest three hours for U.S. Prime sign ups ever in the history of Amazon.” But while the streamer had told advertisers it expected to average 12.5 million viewers per game, at the end of the season Amazon said it had 11.3 million viewers, while Nielsen calculated 9.6 million average viewers. Amazon has said it compensated advertisers for the shortfall but offered no specifics.  

 

Fantastic article, worth reading by everyone!

 

And to get back to 40k, the key player most people overlook is Vertigo Entertainment, ie the producers, who secured the rights and took them to Amazon. Ultimately it's Vertigo that is making the media this will become - they are the Nolans or Russo's or the Alcon Entertainment here, to compare with other producers you all might be familiar with from other amazon-released shows. The key figure here is Natalie Viscuso, Cavill's partner, who is key at Vertigo and which will employ the showrunners responsible for this

 

Quote

Former Legendary Entertainment executive Natalie Viscuso has been tapped to oversee television as Vice President of TV at Roy Lee‘s Vertigo Entertainment.

 

Viscuso joins Vertigo from Legendary, where she served as Vice President of Television and Digital Studios, working on such series as Dune: The Sisterhood for HBO Max, Taika Waititi’s The Auteur for Showtime, and Brujo with HBO Max. She also had projects in development at Hulu, Peacock and Apple. Prior to her time at Legendary, Viscuso held roles at Weinstein Co./Dimension and Tomorrow Studios, having previously worked within the TV Lit Department at Gersh.

 

Vertigo is an LA-based production company, founded by Lee and Doug Davison in 2001. The company has a first-look television deal with Amazon, where it currently has the anthology series Them: Covenant heading into its second season. Under the deal it will be developing and producing new TV series for the streamer across fiction and non-fiction, and in a variety of genres. Outside of Amazon, Vertigo has series set up at HBO, HBO Max, Netflix and Apple, with a large slate of new projects in the works internally.

 

Vertigo was also behind CBS All Access’s limited series The Stand, based on the Stephen King novel. Notable credits on the film side include the It and Lego franchises, The Ring, How To Train Your Dragon and The Departed.

 

Hope this adds clarity to what has been happening!

Edited December 18, 2023 by Petitioner's City
Paragraph breaks, + so so many italics

[loginomicon]

2 hours ago, Brother Captain Arkley said:

 

LOL Joe... Given what they have done to RoP and WoT its quite relevant :)... 

 

And also given one of the producers I am not holding onto hope... 

 

 

 

I would say that you are right but it's definetly a mixed bag with amazon. On one hand some of them completely :cuss: the bed and on the other hand, they have shows like reacher and jack ryan which are in my opinion pretty good adaption of the source materiel ?

[Cyrox]

Bold prediction time:

 

The first Amazon adaptation will be all about Armageddon - tons of Space Marines, Orks and a good helping of Chaos.

 

It will tie in nicely with the end of 40K 10th edition when they do a massive Arks of Omen style campaign focusing on Armageddon.

 

 

[Marshal Rohr]

Working on Dune: The Sisterhood makes me optimistic

[Guest Triszin]

Realistically.

 

This project is a minimum of 5 years out.

 

[Guest]

1 minute ago, loginomicon said:

 

I would say that you are right but it's definetly a mixed bag with amazon. On one hand some of them completely the bed and on the other hand, they have shows like reacher and jack ryan which are in my opinion pretty good adaption of the source materiel ?

 

If certain "creatives" and I use the term loosely are kept away and they get people that actually give a :cuss: about the lore in the same way as Reacher etc then we have a chance of good stuff.

 

If we get infested with people like the ones in charge of the Boys and the last season of Expanse then I am gonna be worried.

 

The person in charge of Fallout is a prime example... They wrote the screenplay for Captain Murval and rebooted Tomb Raider so little to no hope there.

 

Amazon is very much like a mixed bag. I want the producers and writers of stuff like Reacher and Bosch (They actually gave a crap), not the Boys (later seasons) etc.

[One Paul Murray]

I haven't watched RoP, but if we assume it is as bad as people say...

 

There's no reason to think that 40k would suffer in the same way. RoP was an attempt to shoehorn new lore / flesh out minor elements of side books etc, and thus it had a much bigger job to do than just tell a story. Like Rogue One, it was hindered by the fact that you knew how it had to end and so you needed a film that generated intrigue when there was already a fixed endpoint. That is hard. Rogue One managed it, clearly RoP didn't.

 

40k adaptations should not have any of those issues. No shoehorning needed, the material is there if you want it and if you don't then there is a big Galaxy to play in.

 

For my 2 pence, I hope that if they develop new content then they steer clear of the established big characters (Guilliman, 1st Founding Chapters, Abbadon etc). Nobody knew the Blood Ravens before they were invented for a game, so they could do the same here.

 

One other point; for me they need to keep the scale small as so much of the interest in 40k as a universe is in the detail, the micro level not the macro. Xenos would be a great starting point, as big ship fights and Astartes are present but they are sparingly used so they are appropriately awesome.

 

Also so many books have inconsistent power levels that it can be jarring, and I think that would look really bad on screen. So they should decide on power levels and stick to them. Ditto the details like number of marines in a chapter.

 

I was reading one of the Fabius Bile books and there was a brawl with the Red Scimitars on his ship, and it struck me that for the numbers to have been accurate then he had probably wiped out an entire company and doomed them to decades of rebuilding. Similar theme, the Blood Angels book with Rafen in it... they're on their way back from a massive brawl and still have hundreds of Astartes to start a scrap with the Word Bearers. Did they take two thirds of the chapter?

 

Cut that nonsense out. Keep it small scale and focused. Be consistent. 

 

If they do that then there is no reason they can't make things worth watching.

[Nineswords]

59 minutes ago, TrawlingCleaner said:

There are a good few well recieved Amazon shows that are based on existing IP too: Man in the High Castle

 

Incidentally, above mentioned Frank Spotnik was behind the book adaption to Amazon of Man in the High Castle, which is why I was very excited about a potential Eisenhorn adaption for Amazon.

[Halandaar]

45 minutes ago, Triszin said:

Realistically.

 

This project is a minimum of 5 years out.

 

Agree. People talking about stuff coming out and tying in with the end of this edition of 40K are in dreamland.

 

Quick reminder that after HBO secured the rights to the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, it was over four years before Game of Thrones appeared on TV, and ultimately that was just converting an existing story into a new format.

 

At this point all Amazon and GW appear to have agreed is that the former can make products using the latter's IP; there's no indication that anybody has even pitched a story/specific vision for a series, let alone started initial work on it.

 

 

Edited December 18, 2023 by Halandaar

[Cenobite Terminator]

Eisenhorn would be awesome!

[Dark Shepherd]

This is great news.

 

Not just cos LOTR tv show annd Wheel of Time didnt do well but I am pretty sure there wont be any productions of that scale either. Or budget/number of locations of GOT. GOT also had a non broadcast pilot; we might get a warhammer movie first

 

Eisenhorn

Necromunda (Esher)

Sororitas

 

Other guesses for a happy medium between budget friendly and authentic looking and non GW fans can get behind easily enough: Gotrek and Felix, Kislev v Norsca, Ulrika, Underworlds, BSF, Cursed City. Not sure what AOS stuff they might do

Edited December 18, 2023 by Dark Shepherd

[StraightSilver]

I suspect that we will get all new, original, material rather than basing movies or shows on existing books etc.

 

However, if they were going to adapt an existing book I think Dan Abnett's Brothers of the Snake wold be a great first movie. It showcases that the Imperium sends just 1 Space Marine to take back an entire planet after a distress call is sent and that's deemed enough. It has cool, scary Xenos, flashback scenes to develop the Marine's character and would need slightly less budget than some of the grander, more epic bolter porn....

 

It's also set within the Sabbat World's Crusade which means TV shows and other movies could all be set in the same warzone - Gaunt's Ghosts, Double Eagle etc etc.

[skylerboodie]

right?

[WrathOfTheLion]

Wheel of Time immensely suffered for making characters that were already insufferable in the books even more insufferable, somehow. That even includes the main character, I remember really only caring about the scoundrel when slogging through the remainder of the novels many years back.

 

This project I'm more hopeful of however, as the business of GW has a vested interest in protecting their IP, so at the corporate level they'll at least do something. LotR suffers greatly from Christopher Tolkien's passing, which left it without a strong steward, leaving it to the norm where the descendants just want money from it. This is how it goes most of the time, that J.R.R. had an actual strong successor is quite atypical.

Edited December 18, 2023 by WrathOfTheLion