how is there no really good Warhammer 40k tv show?

Submitted by jamtwin1 t3_yijf7v in television

how is there no really good Warhammer 40k TV show? one produced by HBO or something. . every faction/ character in the game is evil to morally grey. i think that could be really interesting character dynamics similar to a game of thrones in the first few seasons. they maybe could maybe adapt specific parts of the universe into a narrative and get henry cavil to play a Primark or something.

is just too big of a universe, too ambitious, or is it just because it wouldn't necessarily appeal to a broad enough audience

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HerbertWigglesworth t1_iuiyime wrote

Genuine question… from an outsiders perspective I am kind of aware of what it is, but how would you sell it to me?

At current all that comes to mind is people painting figurines and playing with them like dungeons and dragons.

What would be an equivalent - existing - programme that you would compare it to to try draw me in? Is the style of this example how you would want it to be presented?

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Archamasse t1_iuj2gqg wrote

Game of Thrones is the most obvious comparison imho, so think of that but throw in spaceships, demons, people duelling with chainsaws, BDSM aliens, and the beach landing of Saving Private Ryan happening so often that individual wars, never mind battles, can be forgotten by the in universe history.

The world of Warhammer 40k is scifi with a lot of gothic influence and religious mania, factional grudges and subcultures. There's a big emphasis on the control of information, propaganda, and the the idea the golden ages are all over and all that's left for everyone is entropy.

The main "storyline" is that about 10k years ago, the human imperium was split apart by a civil war. The traitors/heretics have allied with demons, and the surviving Imperium has turned itself into a fanatical cult of bureaucratic lunacy that fetishizes the lost heyday to the point of regression. The war wiped out all the heroes who might have prevented the ongoing collapse of everything that is now just a forgone conclusion.

You can think of the result as a mixture of Judge Dredd, Game of Thrones, Event Horizon and Battlestar Galactica. There are warp drives sure, but there are also flamethrower wielding nuns. There are interstellar empires, but AI is considered so dangerous that most machinery must have an organic component - ie a lobotomised human - integrated into it and be religiously blessed. The Imperium is technically still standing, but all its fundamental structures and tech is failing.

The Traitors may have failed to win and collapsed into infighting, but they're still out there and their gods are alive and taking calls, so their day's going to come eventually.

Both Imperial and Traitor factions have subgroups within, also, with distinct cultures of their own. So there are Mongolian biker horde or Soviet conscript flavored Imperials vs traitor plague zombie knights or Egyptian sorcerer Traitors.

On top of that you've got Orks (football hooligan orcs who fight for the love of it), Eldar (shifty space elf supremacists who consider humans disposable apes), Necrons (Egyptian flavored space Terminators who want to wipe out all life), Tyranids (space bugs who devour worlds at a time) and Tau (anime flavored nice guy fish men who are largely irrelevant, but are developing tech humans no longer can). All factions are at war, but sometimes enter into allegiances of convenience which can be a ton of fun.

It is very dark in the sense that every happy ending usually comes with a reveal of how shitty the cost of the win actually was, but there's also a lot of black humor in it, particularly in stories of how average day to day humans are getting by in the middle of all this operatic craziness.

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HerbertWigglesworth t1_iuj3h9y wrote

Thanks for spending the time writing that.

Sounds up my street - fine with obscure sci-fi nerd imagination, and the idea of ultra twisted dark themes throughout is kind of what I want to see on screen.

Seems quite accessible to be honest based on some of the recent things I have seen, and there is a gap in the market for more justified shock/to the bone productions.

Do you think it is viable as something for the screen, as someone familiar with the universe?

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Archamasse t1_iuj4v6p wrote

I think it would be possible if you picked a "street level" human to start with, yeah, to give you a sense of the overwhelming scale of the universe and battles they're living in the middle of, and if you had a HBO scale budget commitment.

The main thing though is to be really careful to depict the human Imperium as a bad thing.

The game lore has faltered on this lately as an accidental byproduct of making some beginner game packs accessible "good guys vs bad guys", and the side effect has been to suggest that the atrocities they've committed may have been necessary evils, rather than an illustration of its ongoing downfall.

That sounds like splitting hairs, but it’s a really important distinction that could be really easily lost in translation to tv - there are individually good and heroic humans, but the human imperium as it is, is a monstrous, mindless abyss of suspicion and indifference. If you don't get that right, it reads too much like a fascist apologetic - all the intentionally insane in-universe warcrys and mottos etc will just turn into Facebook motivational shit people take deadly seriously.

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Delicious-Tachyons t1_iujrs3e wrote

WH40K is this dark future where it's perpetual warfare.. they sorta took the Tolkien-style races and moved it to the future plus added new scary aliens and whatnot. The concept that travelling faster than light has to basically go through hell (like Event Horizon, the movie, which is considered a spiritual prequel to WH40K) is really neat.

It's a neat universe. But to make a TV show everything would have to be custom made props, etc, as it looks like a gothic nightmare. There's nowhere you could film in real life that could be used as a set... so it's so very very expensive.

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jamtwin1 OP t1_iuj0k7j wrote

the appeal of the game is how dark and gritty the universe is.

every faction in the game is evil to morally grey. the humans in the game all worship an evil demi-god who they sacrifice thousands of souls too every day keep him alive and in order to conduct space travel. they destroy, pillage, and dominate anyone that also doesn't worship him and consider them to be heritics if they also don't worship him. they're evil

it doesn't matter which faction you chose to play as you're always the bad guy on some level but that can be inherently fun. Everyone gets to be the bad guy!!! it's really niche and nerdy but i really like it. i think the universe, lore and aesthetic are also pretty cool

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HerbertWigglesworth t1_iuj1uxe wrote

Thanks for the response.

I suppose support for the ‘anti-hero’ as a viewer could be interesting, would make good viewing if the audience were all split on whose ‘side’ they took so to speak, or were routing for throughout.

Would be curious to see how they balanced this on screen.

Are there factions within the universe that are either majorly loved or hated by fans, to the extent the producers would want to consider where the fan bases allegiance currently sits?

I suppose favouring the current fan bases story arcs could make it more ‘elitist’ and less open to outsider viewers if they feel there are under/over represented factions. Equally if popular factions are underrepresented, do you think this would piss off the ‘original’/current fans, and receive criticism?

Depends what you are looking for… allegiance to the current client base or adoption by the masses. Sure there is a middle ground, Rings of Power is a recent example, some die hard fans think it’s awful, I am a Lord of the Rings fan but not a lore nerd, so I am not dissecting it as much.

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[deleted] t1_iuj38ot wrote

[removed]

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Archamasse t1_iuj5mku wrote

He believed that the end justified the means.

The lore leaves just enough room for the jury to stay out on whether that was really true.

Earlier stuff was more overt about it, but don't forget how much of the fluff is meant to be in universe propaganda and mythology, from unreliable or compromised narrators.

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WordsAreSomething t1_iuj0psj wrote

Seems like it would be an expensive show for something most people aren't familiar with.

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jamtwin1 OP t1_iuj1xck wrote

most people weren't necessarily familiar with the game of thrones or lord of the rings either and they're great. alot of people would have also just considered them niche nerd stuff until the films and tv shows came out. i think Warhammer could be really good if it was adapted and targeted towards a big audience

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reddit455 t1_iujhf03 wrote

>most people weren't necessarily familiar with the game of thrones or lord of the rings either

how many weeks were the books on the NYT Bestseller list ?

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A Game of Thrones is the first novel in A Song of Ice and Fire, a series of fantasy novels by American author George R. R. Martin. It was first published on August 1, 1996. The novel won the 1997 Locus Award[2] and was nominated for both the 1997 Nebula Award[2] and the 1997 World Fantasy Award.[3]

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The books have sold 90 million copies worldwide as of April 2019,

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings

The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-selling books ever written, with over 150 million copies sold

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>alot of people would have also just considered them niche nerd stuff until the films and tv shows came out.

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the latest ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptations_of_The_Lord_of_the_Rings

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings#Reception

In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted in Britain by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's best-loved book". In similar 2004 polls both Germany[93] and Australia[94] chose The Lord of the Rings as their favourite book. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium".[95] In 2019, the BBC News listed The Lord of the Rings on its list of the 100 most influential novels.[96]

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Archamasse t1_iuiztzq wrote

Up until quite recently, Games Workshop was quite careful who they allowed the license to. This went for games, media and third party merch (bobble heads etc)

This started changing, I would say, sometime after the huge success of the first Dawn of War game. There are now a whole rash of spin off games, action figures, even plushies.

A tv series based around the Eisenhorn stories was even in development at one point, but there has been radio silence on it, so that can be assumed as dead.

In the meantime, they've started their own subscription app that has animations, which is about as close as we'll get for a while I suspect.

As much as I'd love to see a big GoT scale adaptation, I think there are two big issues with that prospect rn -

  1. Firstly, translating 40k recognisably would require an enormous budget. Just to have Space Marine characters walking around next to a random Guardsman would mean $$$$ in terms of layers of bespoke costuming, custom props, a ton of set dressing and CGI polish.

  2. The game itself is struggling right now to figure out how to welcome new players to this grimdark world without making itself palatable to Nazis.

They went way too far on using the Ultramarines as a newbie friendly "vanilla" faction in a bunch of starter kits, stories and subgames, and that's made it much too easy for people to mistake the Imperium for default goodguys. The hopscotch from there to unironic use of the Imperium's fascist imagery or intentionally OTT battle slogans is much too easy to make as a result, currently.

To GW's credit, they seem to recognise the problem now and have started rowing back on it a little, but those issues would be amplified a million times by the simplification required to flatten this universe down to something tv shaped.

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UKS1977 t1_iujutl2 wrote

Grim dark is a little Adolescent and the actual lore is heavily indebted to more famous sources. (Read the original rogue trader rule book and see!)

Edit: and it's all tongue in cheek like Its inspiration Judge Dredd. It's not supposed to be taken seriously.

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Vizjun t1_iujypee wrote

Games Workshop has a streaming service with original shows. There's a Tau one in production. A completed season about blood angels, and some others. They are okay, and only if you like 40k.

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PetyrDayne t1_iuizj0w wrote

There's a Dune tiktoker who explained this world a while back and it just seemed too edgy for mainstream audiences. I could see it an animated series but not live action.

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PolygonMan t1_iuj0s1e wrote

It's edgy as fuck, no doubt. Also some of the deep lore is absurdly dark and twisted. Real Clive Barker level shit.

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jamtwin1 OP t1_iuj293e wrote

that's the way it's great though. that's what made it stand out from other fantasy universes at the time. i still really like it

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PolygonMan t1_iuj3643 wrote

Oh yeah I'm still a big fan. It's just one of those properties that's tough to do as movie/tv because of how over the top everything is. How do you present it without the average person just laughing it off. It's tougher on screen than it is in games or books to strike the balance between ridiculous and believable.

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jamtwin1 OP t1_iuja0zw wrote

That’s Fair. It is still sci if fantasy escapism but I think they could do it in a tasteful non goofy way like Peter Jackson did with lord of the rings

There’s this YouTube series called astrates which was produced by one guy. It’s amazing. if it was presented anything like that I think it would great and appeal to a larger audience.

https://youtu.be/O7hgjuFfn3A

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PolygonMan t1_iujar0s wrote

Yeah I really enjoyed Astartes. But it tells a short, contained story in a very specific way, you couldn't build an entire TV show using just that style.

And I mean, I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying it will be difficult to do it well. Lots of people feel like it's a no-brainer, but... it isn't. Finding that balance will take some skill in terms of writing, directing and acting. And with the current glut of streaming shows good talent is in short supply.

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_Yawnage_ t1_iujc2aq wrote

Ever heard of proofreading and punctuation? What's the deal with your text, OP?

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Delicious-Tachyons t1_iujrg8f wrote

this is an unnecessary comment. When you can be nice you should. You never know if the person is depressed or something and one least mean comment just pushes them over the edge.

Not everyone is good at grammar. Did I understand the paragraph OP wrote? Yes!

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