Henry Cavill back again as Superman! Oops, nevermind.
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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You know what, I was sat there thinking, "no matter what they do, it'll be terrible, I just don't think 40K could translate to a mainstream live action show". But I think if anything could do it, it would be that.
As far as I see it, they either do Ciaphas Cain or deal with the fallout of presenting one of the variations of space nazis.
Funny you should say that. Have you perhaps heard of the exploits of the All-Guardsmen party? It's many things (long included. The shortest of the linked audio series clocks in at half an hour, and totals about 7 hours across its installments), but a boring yarn is not one of them, due in no small part to its colorful cast of characters.
And by 'colorful cast of characters', I mean that it's a tale of a bunch of barely qualified, shellshocked troopers - all of whom are suffering from some shade of trauma-induced neurosis - whose only reward for being the few survivors of an otherwise disastrous defensive campaign against encroaching Orks was getting drafted into being the expendable lackies of aspiring (and largely equally incompetent) Inquisitorial agents who needed some proper field experience before they could be promoted to proper Inquisitors.
It's the 40k setting from the terrified eyes of the regular joes drafted into the army who have been given every reason to assume that without a hefty dose of paranoia on their part - and a generous application of Lasgun fire as their solution to any problem - their life expectancy will be no lengthier following their self-important, out-of-touch superiors' orders than if their ship gets trapped in the Warp.
Or to borrow from TvTropes summation: "A bunch of ragtag, trigger-happy grunts from an Only War campaign wound up playing Dark Heresy, a game ostensibly about clandestine efforts to thwart the enemies of mankind. Hilarity - and awesome - ensues."
Point being that "regular" human stories can work with the right framing.
I think SilentPony's point was not so much that human stories don't work, but more of that they might not be such a good idea for introducing 40K to the masses.
I enjoy me a good Inquisitor or Guard story, but in my opinion, they're generally only entertaining when you have something to contrast them to (aka all the "cool shit"). The absolute peak of humanity versus specks of flesh that the Imperium drowns it's enemies in.
I mean yes, you could still have a Guard story while having this contrast with Space Marines, but I think the shift from "the Emperor himself crafted my genes" to "2 hour life expectancy" is more impactful than the reverse. Only when you have seen the heights of Space Marine heroism can you truly appreciate the insanity of being a single, regular human in the 40K universe.
Wow I forgot to leave my thoughts about Cavill. I do kind of wish he had gotten to play an actual good Superman, but oh well. Better to move to better things. The man can competently play a character, but I have yet to see him play a believable person. His performances generally come off as "theater-ish", which I believe is his background. If that's the limit of his ability or the result of the roles he's cast in, I don't know.
I wish him the best. The nerd love he gets can be kinda annoying but if that's what it takes to get more people into formerly niche franchises, that's fine with me.
I wish him the best. The nerd love he gets can be kinda annoying but if that's what it takes to get more people into formerly niche franchises, that's fine with me.
I think this is what kills me the most about this, is that as someone who also loved The Suicide Squad/Peacemaker, I would have loved to have seen Cavill's Superman written/directed by Gunn, but he's the one giving him the axe here. Oh well, at least they've released Peacemaker season 1 on blu-ray/DVD.
And your source for this is...?
I don't really buy this argument - there's countless film adaptations of obscure works that have been so successful that they've overshadowed the works they were based on (Space Oddyssey, Godfather, Die Hard, Rambo, etc.) And while the argument that humans and orcs may seem limiting, it's not too far removed from something like Lord of the Rings conceptually. Having stuff like night elves thrown in doesn't automatically make the work better.
I can speculate as to why the movie didn't do well, among which being the fact that it's average at best, but this is a film for a general audience. Your average Warcraft fan may be more familiar with WC3/WOW than WC1/2, but to the average filmgoer, that's a moot distinction.
I did.
Okay, technically I played WC3 in an Internet cafe where I played some of the campaign and had no idea what was happening. After getting the game myself and the manual, things made a lot more sense.
Not really. The status quo of 3 can't exist without 1 & 2 happening. It's certainly possible to jump into 3 without playing the earlier games (I'd actually reccomend that for newbies), but in terms of lore? You can't ignore the events of the First and Second War when discussing the Third. Without 1, you have no orcs on Azeroth, without 2, you have no Scourge, etc.
You kind of need to cover a lot more than that. I mean, hypothetically, if I had to start with WC3, then I'd look at how Lord of the Rings handled things. In doing so, I'd have to cover:
-Emergence of the orcs, and the destruction of Stormwind (First War)
-The Second War
-The internment of the orcs, their rebellion, and the Alliance splintering
I can get away without referencing the events of Beyond the Dark Portal, but if you're jumping into the story this late, you need the context behind it. If your story is starting with a fractured Alliance, with orcs revolting against internment camps, and so on, you need to know how things got to that point. Maybe not immediately, but at some point in the story.
Five movies for five campaigns. And yes, every one of that can cover a movie. You can cut out missions 3-5 of the Horde prequel campaign easily enough (certainly that's what the original release did), but apart from that?
You're coming up against the same problems I did. It's hard to mix and match these things, from campaigns that have a beginning, middle, and end, and shift protagonists.
Frankly, if you had to adapt WC3, you could just make it four films. Even if I agreed that little happened in the Horde campaign, you can fill stuff in by including stuff from Jaina's POV, since her forces are active in Kalimdor in the same period Thrall's are. But that's of course me agreeing that it's preferable to jump straight into WC3 from the start. The problem with adapting WC3 (for me) is that you're already adapting a strong story into a different medium. There's less 'return on investment' (storywise) from adapting WC3 than adapting the games prior to it. Whatever the flaws of the actual Warcraft film, it had far more character(s) than the game did for instance.
So it turns out that Amazon deal GW has with Henry Cavil? ...yeah, what they meant to say was "Wouldn't it be great IF we had a tv show deal with Amazon with Henry Cavil?!"
Amazon hasn't signed any deal and nothing is in production.
Amazon hasn't signed any deal and nothing is in production.
I figured that would be the case and it was all just the media coping.
"Goddamn it i wanted Cavill as Superman again, I know I'll spin a story that Cavill is making a Warhammer 40k series or movies with Amazon because Cavill is into 40k, that will give people a coping sense of hope"
I mean the timing of it is also suspect, as soon as the news came out that Cavill was not coming back as Superman in James Gunn's DC. Like hours or a day later these 40k show by Cavill articles started popping up
And its an attempt to pressure Amazon into a contract. Same shit happened when Tom Holland's Spiderman was "at risk" of leaving the MCU. It was contract negotiation via Youtube clickbait titles.
Aw, but watching the fanboys froth over any lore inaccuracy would've been so much fun. Three words. Female space marine. They'd lose all their shit.
Its probably for the best. All the talking heads kept saying "Oh Eisenhorn trilogy! Oh! Inquisitors!" and its like did you actually read those stories? They're boring as fuck, and have next to nothing to do with 40k. They're generic sci-fi stories. You could replace "lasgun" with "blaser", "power sword" with "lightsaber", "Chaos" with the "force" and "heretics" with the "sith" and they would be totally in-canon Star wars novels.
Plus in this day and age, no way Amazon geenlights a show where the Nazis are the good guys. A story about an Inquisitor would be Schindler's List, from the Nazi's point of view.
Oh lesbian transgender liberal female space marines in a love triangle with a black Eldar and a peace love Ork. It'd make ArchWarhammer explode and it would be amazing.
Eisenhorn literally does have a power sword which is just a hilt which creates a blade of coherent light when activated, so yeah.
Though I didn't think those stories were bad, just Abnett likes pumping out stuff that doesn't make much sense or is consistent with the lore or itself.