Deal with GW/Amazon signed

[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

[phandaal]

7 hours ago, Xirix said:

Just as long as Amazon have no say on the content and Cavill / the other fans writing it have creative control... I'll be cautiously optimistic on what they come up with.

 

This 1000%.

 

Give us Reacher, not Wheel of Time.

[Halandaar]

Wheel of Time had the next best person to Robert Jordan himself (Brandon Sanderson) on board as a producer so even the involvement of people very close to the source material doesn't guarantee a good end product. 

 

We don't necessarily need the people in creative control to be existing fans of the setting, they just need to be competent writers who are prepared to understand the setting and represent it accurately, rather than trying to bend it to their own idea of what the setting should be.

[Cyrox]

You can bet that whatever the first thing is, it won't be solely aimed at existing die hard fans, i.e. niche stuff like Eisenhorn 

 

GW will want people to watch the first Amazon feature and go, oh this is cool a heck! and then go straight to the Warhammer website to see what all the fuss is about.

 

Getting more people on board to the worlds or warhammer, and bringing people into the hobby will be one of the main goals.

 

Edited December 18, 2023 by Cyrox

[Brother Captain Arkley]

7 minutes ago, Halandaar said:

Wheel of Time had the next best person to Robert Jordan himself (Brandon Sanderson) on board as a producer so even the involvement of people very close to the source material doesn't guarantee a good end product. 

 

We don't necessarily need the people in creative control to be existing fans of the setting, they just need to be competent writers who are prepared to understand the setting and represent it accurately, rather than trying to bend it to their own idea of what the setting should be.

 

Yeah Sandersons stance on that abomination is very odd to say the least.

 

But I think more people want the creativity and craft of people that did stuff like Reacher over WoT and RoP.

[mecanojavi99]

17 minutes ago, Cyrox said:

You can bet that whatever the first thing is, it won't be solely aimed at existing die hard fans, i.e. niche stuff like Eisenhorn 

 

GW will want people to watch the first Amazon feature and go, oh this is cool a heck! and then go straight to the Warhammer website to see what all the fuss is about.

 

Getting more people on board to the worlds or warhammer, and bringing people into the hobby will be one of the main goals.

 

Calling Eisenhorn niche is like calling Gotrek & Felix niche, they are the go to answers when someone asks for an entry point into 40K and Fantasy.

 

In the case of 40K Gaunt's Ghosts and Ciaphas Cain would also be good entry points, but I would argue that Eisenhorn allows for a deeper look into the main antagonist of the setting, the Imperium.

[mecanojavi99]

1 hour ago, EnsignJoker said:

The show is going to be developed to be mainstream, which means it’s not gonna be made for us diehards. I’m expecting Ring of Power/Halo/Witcher type nonsense here. I’m gonna set my expectations seriously low for this deal, if we even see anything tangible come from it. 

I fail to see where is the problem in doing a mainstream show? The Clone Wars started as a weekly Cartoon Network show and ended up becoming one of the most beloved Star War series ever created.

 

A series is good or bad based solely on it's content, not the audience it's aimed at.

[Cyrox]

12 minutes ago, mecanojavi99 said:

Calling Eisenhorn niche is like calling Gotrek & Felix niche, they are the go to answers when someone asks for an entry point into 40K and Fantasy.

 

In the case of 40K Gaunt's Ghosts and Ciaphas Cain would also be good entry points, but I would argue that Eisenhorn allows for a deeper look into the main antagonist of the setting, the Imperium.

 

Perhaps not niche, but to the outsider, it kinda is - something like Eisenhorn is not one of the characters or images you see on the front of the website, or as a banner image on Warcom, or even on stuff they've done like the Panini sticker books etc

 

Don;t get me wrong, I hope they DO make something like that first, but I'd wager its more likely to be Space Marine flavoured

 

 

 

 

[brother_b]

14 minutes ago, mecanojavi99 said:

I fail to see where is the problem in doing a mainstream show? The Clone Wars started as a weekly Cartoon Network show and ended up becoming one of the most beloved Star War series ever created.

 

A series is good or bad based solely on it's content, not the audience it's aimed at.

Probably because WOT and ROP were not good. 

[Lexington]

Well, we'll see. Given the incredibly meagre results GW themselves have managed to achieve with Warhammer+, I'm not precisely expecting much.

 

Re: the discussion here, man...if only it was so easy as 'staying true to the lore,' or whatever. There's so, so much more to the creation of a big prestige teevee show than that. If it were just a question of directly porting an existing work onto film, we'd have an endless supply of amazing television shows, and producers would barely have to worry about any of the messy creative stuff - your script and concepts are right there, after all.

 

Of course, it doesn't work that way for a million reasons, and there's as many (or more!) wildly successful adaptations that throw all but the base concept out the window in favor of doing their own thing. Movies, television shows and etc. are just such unimaginably enormous projects, with literal years of man-hours going into work that's often entirely invisible to the audience. Quality is very hard to come by, and even more so now that the bottom is starting to fall out of the streaming business model. It'll be a miracle if we get something truly memorable out of this effort, and it'll have very little to do with someone doing the easy work of picking up a novel that takes a few hours to read.

 

5 hours ago, Lord_Ikka said:

when you are talking about a company like GW that is extremely protective, and litigious, over its IP [...]

 

Is GW actually that litigious? They seem fairly lenient, really, and this is coming from someone who's been at the sharp end of their legal department's unpleasantries.

Edited December 18, 2023 by Lexington

[Vassakov]

The problem with Space Marines is that from a narrative perspective, they're generally pretty dreadful protagonists - at least from the conventional character arc sense. 

 

An "origins" story in the vein of Bill King's Ragnar series might work, but but given that there's not really a lot of character change for most Astartes - they just get better at killing/commanding/inspiring - I don't think they'd be great as main characters. Now, a supporting character turning up at the end of the second act to deliver the Emperor's judgement... that would work. Especially if a Chaos Marine was introduced first as an apparently insurmountable threat....

 

Oh, what's that? The plot of Xenos...? With some Deathwatch and an Emperor's Children Marine who is more serial killer than... well, I'm not sure the forum rules permit the term but let's just say that some depictions of Slannesh's influence probably won't fly for a mass-market project. 

 

The one thing I would say is that there would probably be a few changes to anything they were adapting, particularly if it's older material and especially in terms of the cast, which I am sure would be more diverse than, say, Xenos. And I'm sure the usual suspects would wail over such changes, even though literally the next novel killed off one character and replaced them with his daughter...

[Dark Shepherd]

Varagnatua could be a good setting, as could anything shipboard

 

Warhammer Crime in general felt like an attempt to generate raw material for scripts

 

Theres at least 3 Warhammer Horror authors with backgrounds/previous work in film and tv

 

Warhammer TV might have been a testing ground for screenwriters too

[Halandaar]

1 hour ago, Brother Captain Arkley said:

Yeah Sandersons stance on that abomination is very odd to say the least.

 

I agree with his overall stance, which seems to be "it doesn't have to be a 1:1 remake of the novels, it can depart from them and thanks to the cyclical nature of the story those variations can be canonically valid". But the liberties taken by the writers seem to exceed that; he's been pretty open on his podcasts and webchats that he's given feedback on the scripts (up to and including "this is bad and you shouldn't do it and here are the reasons why with references") that was ignored, multiple times. 

 

But to bring it back to 40K, the point is that you could have a hypothetical Gaunt's Ghosts TV series with Dan Abnett attached as a producer that still isn't a good representation of the novels or the wider setting.

 

 

[Brother Captain Arkley]

21 minutes ago, Halandaar said:

 

 

But to bring it back to 40K, the point is that you could have a hypothetical Gaunt's Ghosts TV series with Dan Abnett attached as a producer that still isn't a good representation of the novels or the wider setting.

 

 

Oh god no after his Ultramarines screenplay. 

 

To touch on the 1to1 thing its not even that... Just having competent writers, which WoT, RoP and Witcher to name a few simply did not have, would be an excellent start.

Edited December 18, 2023 by Brother Captain Arkley

[Marshal Reinhard]

Dan abnett's rendition of marines in general have never really wowed me. He does them best as kind of one of monsters or in the background allies to his human elements, which he does do very well 

[lost_angel]

4 minutes ago, Brother Captain Arkley said:

Oh god no after his Ultramarines screenplay. 

 

To touch on the 1to1 thing its not even that its just having competent writers, which WoT, RoP and Witcher to name a few simply did not have.

this 100%. Abnett’s got some reasonable potential source material but, dear lord, don’t let him have any further say in the production. 
 

 

[Noserenda]

Yeah Ultramarines was spectacularly bad, and the script was a big part of it. Which is a shame because i think Abnett has the most screen writing experience of the regular BL stable.

I did think the rumour was as much that the deal was signed massively in Amazons favour rather than not signed at all, we probably wont see if thats actually true for years though.

Whatever they do is almost certainly going to have marines in it, and not Heresy ones if the deal is for the 40k IP, 30k is a separate DLC :P 

Plus, arent the rights for Eisenhorn already optioned elsewhere? 

Edited December 18, 2023 by Noserenda
Eisenhorn

[Triszin]

If I had to guess?

 

Bequin series

[Mechanicus Tech-Support]

I know RoP gets dragged a lot but weren't the writers hands tied for that one as they were only allowed to use a small part of the IP? ie. Making a show based off the Silmiril...Sil, but only being able to use some appendixes from The Hobbit/Fellowship. I doubt the 40k/WH show will have such stipulations (hopefully).

 

And if we're lucky we don't get writers "who can do better than the source material" (witcher). But having Cavill be involved gives me hope that he'll keep things on track like Sir Ian McKellen did for lotr

[Mazer Rackham]

Well I messaged Henry on Instagram last year about this, as a complete stranger of course, revealing his true calling was to portray Bill King's Lord Solar Macharius.

 

Or Lugft Huron.

 

I expect a reply any day now.

[phandaal]

3 minutes ago, Mechanicus Tech-Support said:

I know RoP gets dragged a lot but weren't the writers hands tied for that one as they were only allowed to use a small part of the IP?

 

Honestly, the writers seemed like they were just bad at their jobs. The scale of the backlash was certainly due to them inflicting their work on such a beloved franchise, but it would have been a bad show even if it was just Generic Fantasy IP.

 

Amazon has demonstrated the ability to create both massive stinkers and well-received shows, so here's hoping 40k gets the latter.

[DukeLeto69]

Are we allowed to dream on this thread?

 

TV Series:

- Eisenhorn > Ravenor > Bequin

- Gaunts Ghosts

- Warhammer Crime (possibly as anthology series)

- An Anthology Series (Tales from the Dark Millennium, includes Necromunda, WH Horror)

- Vaults of Terra

- Night Lords (ADB trilogy that is)

- The Beast Arises (but better)

- The Horus Heresy (series covering the setting not the main story arc which is a film trilogy)

 

Films:

- The Horus Heresy (trilogy)

and...

and...

and...!

 

[Doghouse]

I'd like to see Eisenhorn then have Henry pop up as Valdor in both that and a Heresy series.

 

I will be interested to see how more mainstream audiences view any potential 40k series to be honest.

[Cactus]

The one piece of Black Library fiction that seems ideal for a TV adaptation is Graham MacNeill's ...of Mars trilogy. It has an arc that can be sustained across two or three series, shorter arcs within that to give a series climax/cliffhanger, and lots of people meeting from different groups gives plenty of opportunities for exposition and character introductions.

[Nephaston]

20 minutes ago, DukeLeto69 said:

- The Horus Heresy (trilogy)

 

More like;

- The Horus Heresy (triacontalogy)

 

if we really want to milk it dry.