After abandoning The Witcher series for Netflix, Henry Cavill has set his sights on a big screen reboot of Highlander and, more importantly, plans for an Amazon-backed Warhammer 40,000 TV series that would mark the beginning of a long-term partnership with Games Workshop (hopefully). Now, however, we’re learning that all of that may not end up happening, but hope remains.
IGN first shared the news, which appeared in Games Workshop’s annual financial report Long story short: the company is very serious about either getting things right or scrapping altogether.
Manage Cookie Settings
Back in December 2023, we learned that Games Workshop had finally signed a deal with Amazon to start producing tentative series and further build out the universe, as it was also keen to get the movies out. The fine print of the agreement stipulated that Games Workshop would only work exclusively with Amazon for 12 months, starting in December 2023, to “agree on creative guidelines for the films and TV series to be developed by Amazon”. It seems that such creative guidelines have not yet been drawn up, so if no agreement is reached by December 2024, Amazon may not end up having exclusive rights to the IP.
No matter how enthusiastic Cavill is about a potential project, Warhammer 40,000 is going to be hard to tame, as Games Workshop is very strict about its flagship sci-fi universe outside of the realm of tabletop gaming. Oliver Hollis-Lake, creative director of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marines 2, confirmed this to me in a recent chat.
Mind you, most IP holders want to make sure collaborations and adaptations go smoothly, but we often get half-baked projects that bear little resemblance to the original or don’t give it a compelling enough twist. At the same time, Games Workshop is being very careful about WH40K canon and how everything is represented elsewhere, which makes it closer to what Disney and Lucasfilm do with Star Wars IP outside of film and TV than it is to something like Sonic the Hedgehog.
We’re pretty sure a WH40K series or movie will come sooner or later, but we don’t count on this particular treatment of the long-running universe to be a success. Regardless, Space Marine 2 looks great, so we’ll still be hyped for it.
