Why That Warhammer 40'000 TV Show Is Probably Never Going To Happen.

 

I know you probably don't want to hear this, but that Henry Cavill Warhammer 40k TV show is probably not going to happen.

Don't feel bad. It was always going to be a long shot.

If you're a Warhammer fan of any stripe chances are you will have fantasised about a 40k movie or TV show at one time or another. This is not unusual. When you have a niche interest then mainstream live-action productions can frequently feel like cultural approval. "You were always right to like this thing."

It's a mostly false assumption, of course. You shouldn't need external validation to like the things you like. Fallout isn't any more a valid fictional work than Halo just because Fallout had a successful TV show while Halo's flopped, but to Halo fans it obviously stings a bit when they hear colleagues around the water cooler talking about Fallout when they could have been talking about Halo.

So when we get titbits of news about a Warhammer TV show or a movie happening we tend to hold onto them like a flotation aid. "It's going to happen," we tell ourselves "Mainstream acceptance at last!" The truth of the matter is, however, that hope alone isn't going to deliver these fantasies, and Warhammer 40k, a fictional setting that is defined frequently by the very absence of hope, has a difficult road to walk before your work colleges will be gushing about Roboute Guilliman around the water cooler.

I've always wanted to see a successful 40k TV show or movie some day, but I know how unlikely a proposition that is, not just from my degree in media and film production, but also just from paying attention to the film and TV landscape of the last fifteen years. Just because, against all odds, we got a successful TV show based on Fallout, doesn't make a 40k TV show any more likely.

In fact, keep Fallout in your mind for now, because that's a good place to weave into the first and primary issue a 40k show is going to have to face.

Part One: Budget.

TV shows are expected to make money. You know this. However, they work a little differently from films because they are not a "one time charge," product like movies are. With films, a studio creates the product (shoots the movie,) makes it available for purchase (puts it in cinemas,) charges for the product (sells tickets,) and then hope their takings outweigh their expenditure (if enough tickets are sold, the cost of the movie is paid for, and everything else is profit.)

With TV, everything is a little more opaque. You don't pay a one time charge for every episode of The Traitors you watch. Instead, TV shows are expected to "contribute," to an overall entertainment and media service. The more viewers the shows get, the more money the company can make, either through advertising (the more viewers you pull in, the more you can charge potential clients,) or through subscriptions (the more viewers you have, the more likely they are to keep paying you month-by-month, and the higher you can charge them.)

(Note: One exception here is state broadcasters like the BBC, which do not work towards a profit and instead is paid for by a licence fee. It's a little more complicated in their regard, but ultimately they still have to justify their existence by pulling in decent viewing numbers.)

All this is to say, TV services do not want to spend a lot of money if they can get away with it. Winning back their costs can be much harder than film. It's why they commission so many reality TV shows. A low budget show failing to find an audience is bad, but an expensive TV show failing to find an audience can be catastrophic. It's the kind of situation people lose their jobs over, or in worse cases can doom entire networks.

"But Jack!" I hear you cry. "What about Fallout? That was a weird risk based on a niche IP that was no doubt very expensive to to pull off, and that made it to air!"

So, the thing is, I get it. Fallout is based around an IP set in a universe of very specific, hyper technical lore and backstory, with a unique aesthetic and involves guys in big suits of power armour shooting guns. Sure. If they can pull off a Brotherhood of Steel Paladin, they can pull off a Space Marine Terminator, right?

See, you're not wrong. We really are living in an era where studios are willing to take a greater chance on more risky projects. In many ways this was thanks to Game of Thrones, which at the time was a very risky proposition that many predicted would be an expensive disaster. Thrones became a massive hit, and a huge earner for HBO. Many of the folks involved would become household names. It's genuinely surprising that a TV show based around the kind of story only my D&D group would have been interested in became a common subject of discussion by my Dad's mates at rugby matches.

But Game of Thrones, and even Fallout, is a galaxy away from something like 40k. Fallout is still, by and large, a setting that you can film mostly with sets and locations. It's going to take place in dusty desert environments, or ruined convenience stores, something that US TV production has an abundance of. Game of Thrones, taking place in a world and time completely separate from ours, could be filmed with locations and props rooted within our real world past.

Take a look at one image from Warhammer 40'000, though. Any one. A codex cover. A video game screenshot. A diorama of the models themselves. What is the first thing that jumps out to you?

These images are BUSY. They are often filled with large groups of people, huge, titanic machines and buildings in the background. Artifacts and livery are emblazoned on nearly every piece of clothing. Purity seals rustle in the breeze. Cyber-cherubs glide through the sky. Servitors cluster around broken vehicles as soldiers, dead in the eye, charge towards their next brush with death.

In 2010, Games Workshop released their very first attempt at at a Warhammer 40'000 cinematic production. It was called Ultramarines. It used state of the art CGI and motion capture technology. It had an all-star cast of venerable British actors and a script penned by Dan Abnett, author of many beloved 40k novels. It flopped spectacularly and was dismissed by almost everybody as a failed experiment.

The film had many problems. The script was bland and unadventurous. The CGI looked simplistic and was compared unfavourably to video game cutscenes. However, the real problem is clear as day to those who think about it. The film just looks too empty. While the Space Marines and their weapons are rendered in loving detail, the sets around them are starkly lacking in anything at all. Open hanger bays and flat desert environments are the stage on which this adventure is set. It were as though the film took place on an empty Garry's Mod server.

For a 40k story this is a big problem! Where are the servitors, clanking to their work? Where are the servo skulls buzzing around? Where are the inconceivably large ruins tangled in colossal pipes and support beams, flanked by titanic statues of warriors and saints?

More than anything else, it is the sheer amount of "stuff," going on that really makes 40k what is is, and that isn't something that you can do on the cheap.

Now I can already hear you typing. "Well why not start small? We don't need to go right into a massive story. Start with something like Gaunt's Ghosts, where all the heroes and antagonists are human, or tell a story about a small war-band investigating a low-tech planet!" I understand that instinct. If budget is the problem then why don't we shrink things down? Why not strip away the bigger stuff at first until the show has a sizeable enough audience that can then coax the studio into giving them a bigger budget?

Here you have two problems. Firstly, budget isn't a matter of "big is expensive, small is cheap." HBO's Deadwood was famously one of the most expensive TV shows ever made at the time it went to air, and that show just took place on one old-time wild-west street. Using CGI and blue-screen can often be MORE expensive than locations or sets. Productions can bleed money in a variety of ways. Writing a story about an Inquisition agent trailing a fugitive in just a single Hive City block sounds like it could be done on the cheap, but it could just as easily become astronomically expensive as it is, putting aside the fact that even a small scale-40k story has to have weapons and armour purpose built for the show. They can't just do what Alien Earth did and get some off-the-shelf helmets and fatigues and slap some Pulse-Rifle looking frames on existing gun props.

Problem number two is the bigger one though. That's not Warhammer 40'000. That's a story SET in Warhammer 40'000. The difference? Well imagine if they did a Fallout TV show and it was set entirely within a vault. Just the characters getting swept up in drama and adventure, but they never actually enter the wasteland. Sure you could do a decent story with that framework. There's no reason why a Fallout story can't be set entirely within a vault, but fans of the games are going to spend the entire viewing experience as Milhouse asking when they are going to get to the fireworks factory. As for the new audiences, they might very well enjoy that show, but it would not be representative of the "Fallout experience." Half the appeal would be lost in adaption.

They didn't do that though did they? They asked "What is the core Fallout experience, in brief?" The answer is, generally, "Naive and inexperienced vault dweller is forced to leave their relative safety and learn to survives in a hostile wasteland, learning about the strange state of the world from both new friends and enemies."

That is exactly what they delivered when the first season went to air.

So what is the core Warhammer 40'000 experience? Fundamentally it is "Massive armies clash in a nightmare future war." Massive armies. Nightmare future. This is WARhammer. In this dark future there is ONLY WAR. You can't justify a WARhammer TV show that is about an Inquisitor or Assassin on a lone mission, or a small squad on a tactical raid. "Massive armies, going to war." That is what will be expected, that is what will be needed, this is what Games Workshop is going to want as a forward facing part of their brand, and anything else, even if good, would be misrepresentative of what 40k is supposed to be about.

You have to ask if it would be even remotely possible to pull that off on a TV budget.

Part 2: Marketability

So lets say we nail it anyway. We get a smart and savvy show-runner that knows how to squeeze every cent out of their budget and a writing team that can make every second of screen time feel like a genuine 40k experience. This is still something you're going to need to get broadcasters, investors, shareholders and distributors behind.

If you're a deep fan of 40k it might be easy to forget just how weird this fictional setting is. A lot of people compare it to Dune, or Alien, and make the argument that Event Horizon is an unofficial prequel (it isn't, and it never will be, stop trying to make that a thing,) but the truth is that 40k is far stranger than all of those by design. The Imperium of Man is supposed to be as off-putting as possible in such a way that it can feel more alien to us than some of the aliens in 40k do.

This is a setting that has a church more perverse than the most oppressive theocracies in history. This is a setting where your average Joe works morning noon and night in lung blackening conditions all to get by long enough for their children to grow up and do an even worse job. That is if they aren't lobotomised and turned into cyborg servitors first, or recruited to die an agonising death in a war on the other side of the galaxy.

This is a setting where a single second's thought of resistance can see you executed in the most heinous way, thanks to the merest possibility that your thoughts for a better life leave you open to demonic possession, and if your fight for a better life did ever get off the ground, there's the very real possibility that it gets co-opted by the aforementioned demons or alien parasites and just ends up making everything worse.

Oh, and also there's a bunch of big green aliens that look and act like cartoon characters and spend their entire lives acting like they are in hyper-violent Buster Keaton routines.

Oh, and the Elves from Lord of the Rings are there basically playing 4-D chess with galactic politics.

Oh and there are a bunch of metal spooky scary skeletons that...

You get the idea.

Point is, the 40k setting is a really difficult fictional world to introduce to an audience going in blind. To compare this to Fallout again, that show simply needed to explain that "Nuclear war happened, there's robots and mutants and future-knights, and a bunch of people living in bunkers, and everything is like the 50s." That's not too much of a hurdle, and given that most people have seen one of the Mad Max films, they're probably already halfway there before the end of the first episode.

40k though? There's so much you need to get through. Sure you can leave out the backstory of the Emperor, servitors, how the warp works, what exactly Space Marines are, etc, but the problem is if you leave too much unexplained it is going to become a problem further down the line. This will especially be a problem when adapting a pre-existing story from one of the books or comics, because those were written under the assumption that the reader already has a familiarity with the setting in the first place.

That isn't to say it can't be done. I think a lot of the video games do a good job of quickly explaining to the player everything they need to know before going into battle, but video games aren't TV. You can get away with over-explaining background lore in games in a way you can't really in live action drama. In playing Darktide, for example, through interactions with the medical and armoury servitors, we immediately understand their role and purpose within the setting without ever having to be sat down and told what they are. A TV show might have a more difficult time applying show-don't-tell to the setting's more weirder aspects, and that's even before a story of bleak, oppressive totalitarianism introduces something wacky and over-the-top like Nurglings or the Orks.

On top of all this, you have to remember, that executives don't like risks. Believe me when I say that the people at the top have no idea what they are doing, so nine times out of ten they just try and copy what is already successful. This is how you end up with every studio trying to start a cinematic universe after the success of the Avengers. This is how you end up with a dozen Game of Thrones spin-offs and knock-offs. These are the kind of people you need to convince a TV show is worth spending money on.

"It's like Dune!" you plead, as they take a look of concept art of a big green monster that almost certainly doesn't come from Denis Villeneuve's beautifully cerebral fever dream. "Uh... with a bit of Lord of the Rings!" you add, as they flip through the script to be confronted with a scene that uses words like "Immaterium," "Astropath," and "Gellar fields," You pull at your collar, sweat running down your brow. "Uhh... you ever see the film Event Horizon?"

The things is, they are not just the ones you have to convince. With any pitch, there are multiple points of failure, from the executives at the top, to the broadcasters that set the budget, scheduling teams who pick the timeslot, to the test audiences that can trap it in development limbo, to the final viewing figures that can doom the project on day one.

This is a difficult proposition for any TV show, but it's going to be a particular uphill struggle for something that is going to use the word "Omnissiah," on a regular basis. A 40k show is going to have to jump through so many hoops from concept to screen, in order to get the support it requires, the budget it needs, and to be able to actually advertise and sell itself to the general public.

And even after all of that, there's no guarantee it'll actually be good.

Part Three: Fan Reaction.

When Star Wars: The Last Jedi came out in 2017 I heard about the reactions first. Fans were abandoning the franchise after years of dedication, online chatter suggested. Star Wars had been ruined beyond repair, I was told. I was left wondering what lore-breaking controversial changes had been made that would cause such an uproar.

Then I went to see the film and it was a normal Star Wars film where normal Star Wars stuff happens.

I'm not going to litigate the reaction to The Last Jedi here, but I think there is no better example of how we now live in a world where fan expectation can blow things completely out of proportion. Thanks to the internet, amongst other culprits, fandom disappointment can now be turned into a world altering event. It would be funny if wasn't for the actual harm that comes from fan backlash. Harassment, stalking, death threats and worse have all manifests from the unhealthy obsession that fandom has festered into in certain corners of society.

40k is no different in this regard, but no other IP is situated to be such a perfect breeding ground for unrealistic expectations and petulant backlash. Given the size of the franchise, and the fact that this is a big universe being adapted, not a linier story, it is going to be almost impossible to please everyone. 40k means different things to different people and what a TV show chooses to prioritise is going to appeal to some and alienate others.

The titular Space Marines, for example, are beloved by many fans but despised by others for their tendency to steal the spotlight from the other factions. A TV show that dedicates an inordinate amount of time to our big boys in big shoulder pads is almost certainly going to bristle against fans who want to see parts of the wider galaxy. A TV show that locks itself purely into the point of view of human protagonists is going to struggle to win over the fans who like to experience the story from the alien and supernatural perspectives.

On top of that there's just the general tendency for fans to bend themselves out of shape over the most trivial of details. Last year Games Workshop famously drew the ire of some fans over the introduction of a female member of the Adeptus Custodes faction, due to them being related to the more traditional Space Marines, who have long been described as an all-male army, an aspect of canon that the fanbase frequently argues over.

Certain fans are going to be willing to write the show off wholesale over minor inaccuracies. More extreme parts of the internet will drive themselves into a frenzy over larger ones. Something as minor as depicting a weapon working differently, or a character acting more or less powerful than usual has the potential to light the tinderbox. Including an element that contradicts a larger part of canon runs the risk of a massive backlash. All this in spite of the fact that Games Workshop have gone on record that 40k is supposed to be a universe of inaccuracies and misinformation, and thus any part of canon is liable to be re-written at any given time.

There's also the uncomfortable fact that a lot of Nazis really like 40k.

This comes to the bemusement of many because 40k is a fictional setting that unambiguously depicts fascism, religious fanaticism and authoritarianism as evil and stupid, but it isn't that surprising. As mentioned earlier, 40k is an IP first and foremost, not a singular story. This primarily leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

There's an entire other article to be written on why the far right will happily latch on to a franchise that is meant to be explicitly anti-fascist, so let me just say that if you buy the models and play the games you are mostly free to pick and choose what you want to pay attention to as far as the background story is concerned. It really isn't that much of a jump to convince yourself that the Imperium is not a nightmare future scenario that must be avoided at all costs, but a blueprint of a society that is justified in its atrocities in the name of survival.

Games Workshop has tried to pry off the fascist portion of the fan base many times but here they still remain, fused to the wood like barnacles, and they'll be the first to hit the message boards the moment a TV show happens to depict something that isn't to their liking, which, you know, probably ought to be something within the first ten seconds if you're writing this correctly.

So, given that a 40k TV show has to contend not only with the expectations of a predictably rabid fanbase, but also the very people it is supposed to be criticising, there's an almost non-zero chance that somebody on the creative team, be it a writer, director, or more than likely, actor, finds themselves in the firing line of fan-ire. Harassment, death threats, you know the deal by now.

An ecosystem like that is going to make one wonder why you'd even want to bother doing an adaption at all.

And that's the million-dollar question here. Even if you can secure that budget, and put together a pilot that can sell 40k to a general audience, how do manage the sprawling masses of fans, many of whom have very different priorities and expectations? How do you make sure it doesn't balloon into an uncontrollable backlash? If the Last Jedi, a, frankly, very safe and normal Star Wars movie, caused a fan schism that derailed careers, what hope is there for a 40k series that has almost no chance of being able to please everybody in the first place?

Conclusion: That Warhammer 40'000 TV show is probably never going to happen

I want to be wrong about this. I really do want to see the 40k universe in live action. TV, movie, whatever, I want to be able to sit down and watch Hollywood actors dressed in extravagant costumes use words like "Ministorum," and "Gargant," with a straight face. I want to see massive armies clash in the mud and the dirt as demons cackle and servo-skulls whizz through the air. I want Henry Cavill to actually get a project that he sees through to the end.

Yet, I think I've made it pretty clear the hurdles the project needs to jump over. 40k isn't another sci-fi property that Amazon or Netflix just needs to throw a decent budget at to get to work. This isn't Foundation, or Halo, and it certainly isn't Fallout. There's no pre-existing example that serves as a route to success.

Unlike the 40k setting, however, hope still exists, in one form or another. There's a spark, a possibility, that this whole thing will come together. I want to believe that. I want to be sitting here in a couple of years time writing "We got a 40k TV show, it was great, and here's how they pulled it off."

That'd be nice right? It's probably never going to happen though, and no amount of news updates every six months saying Henry Cavill is totally getting his shoulder pauldrons measured right now is going to change that.

--------------------

Jack Harvey 2026. Images used under Fair Use. Warhammer 40'000 is (c) Games Workshop.