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Discuss ideas, why should therr be one? Why shouldn't there be? Why hasn't GW agreed to a film or television series when dark fantasy is so strong in the media (GoT)? They have expanded media in both games and books, why not film?

Discuss

Well, you know, it's hard making a TV series nowadays maaann...

But why is it hard? Asked nobody ever.

Good, nobody, here are the reasons why I think GW haven't made a WHFB TV series.

Back then they simply did not have the means to do so; believe it or not it's expensive to make a TV show. Given the scale it's likely going to be, the sets, props, and massive battle scenes that will inevitably have to pop up every 5 episodes cost a lot. Then came PJ's LotR: it was popular, it sparked public interest in the Lord of the Rings, and High Fantasy stuffs in general, and it also cost a bunch to make. This basically told them: yeah, don't even bother, it will bankrupt you even if you do this in TV form.

So now GoT is around, and such and such. The TV series market is actually now pretty crowded, since most people only have to time and attention for one or two series at the same time. Without the viewership there will be no drive for investers nor advertisers to keep making the series.

But a competitive market place is no obstacle for a fresh idea, with quality script and loads'O'money as backup. Well... yeah, we've got none of that.

The idea: the Warhammer universe has some good, innovative ideas, but a good number of them are worn-out fantasy cliches that's been done to death. Also, for some reason, made from the beloved tabletop wargame (where players simulate battles with plastic toys miniatures) Warhammer Fantasy Battle doesn't sound like a good sales pitch to me.

The stories: writers working for GW isn't known for consistent story-telling either. There are few Warhammer fantasy novels that really stand out as something both interesting and new. Turning those stories into a TV series can be done, but not likely profitable. Furthermore, writing an entirely new script would be more costly, and the result unpredictable.

And Investment: well, GW may have the capital to do so, but it's a huge investment given that they aren't a movie/tv studio house with money just for the purpose of making TV shows. GW is a company that focuses on making plastic toys. Putting the investment into something means not being able to put it somewhere else, and no, not corporate salary, but expansion or maintenance of their business. GW may not be smart about their business model, but they are suicidal, such a risk isn't something they will make easily.

I mean, just look at The Ultramarines: A Warhammaer 40,000 Movie, straight-to-DVD, mediocre budget and even more mediocre end results. The whole warhammer universes are niche hobbies. They are expensive to translate to TV or movie, and have a very limited user base. Especially now that TV shows and movies are frequently made for already famously popular series like GoT, and eh, well, some other things, it's just difficult for Warhammer to be considered by the big shots.

Personally, I think this is for the best. I'd rather have just novels to read than this.

Well, the reason there isn't one is that TV costs far more than either book or game, takes longer to make, and would also advertise their product somewhat, which they couldn't possibly risk! I guess there's always a chance that, in this GoT-crazed age, they would be seen as ripping off that by the public at large despite the fact WFB came first (The same could be said with regard to LotR, the difference being that GW did take a lot from that!).

That said, I'd love to see a WFB series or film, despite never wanting 40k on the screen (for various reasons, mostly to do with scale issues). The setting is generic enough that you wouldn't have to do a huge amount of explanation, but at the same time offers a lot in terms of originality (can't think of anything that does Demons quite like WFB). You wouldn't even need everyone in it, you could just set it in the Empire and have one faction as the Big Bad, with the rest just showing up every now and then. As mentioned in another thread recently, to most Imperials, Skaven are a myth, magic is something from storybooks and the chances of seeing a dragon once in your life are pretty damn low, so you certainly woundn't need a boatload for SFX every episode. Even just theinternal politics of the Empire would make a decent premise, with two vying Lords trading tricks and subterfuge, eventually leading one towards Chaos (wittingly or otherwise) in an attempt to oust his rivals.

On a side note, you should check out the film Solomon Kane if you haven't seen it. It's ostensibly set in 16th Century England or thereabouts, but could just as easily be the story of the son of an Elector Count returning after wars in distant lands to find a Chaos Cult in his former lands, leading to much ass-kicking, swordplay and more than a few awesome hats. There's even a Demon that bears quite the resemblance to a Bloodthirster at one point.

I think people generally overestimate the size of GW. I doubt GW themselves could invest into that kind of programme.

It might be the "big player" in the miniatures gaming company, but it's still a tiny, tiny company by most, including general entertainment, standards.

The average GoT Episodes costs 5-6 Million USD to make. 2 or 3 Episodes would eat GW's annual profit as it is. LoTR-movies cost more to make, than GW made in its history as a company, many times over.

GoT is without doubt a huge hit for HBO, but HBO could've shrugged off GoT tanking, or being somewhat less successful (e.g. Rome, etc..). They've done plenty of shows that lost them money in their time.

GW blowing some 10 years of profit on a single season? Not so much.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Paradigm wrote:


On a side note, you should check out the film Solomon Kane if you haven't seen it. It's ostensibly set in 16th Century England or thereabouts, but could just as easily be the story of the son of an Elector Count returning after wars in distant lands to find a Chaos Cult in his former lands, leading to much ass-kicking, swordplay and more than a few awesome hats. There's even a Demon that bears quite the resemblance to a Bloodthirster at one point.

It also tanked. According to Wikipedia, that movie cost some 40 Million USD to make, and according to Box Office Mojo, it made about 19 Million USD worldwide.

Except GW has had multiple opportunities to sell their IP to others. People have approached them with deals for every type of media. GW is just full of control freaks who want total control over their IP that nobody can work with them.

GW could make tons of money, but they're absolute morons.

Wonderwolf wrote:

 Paradigm wrote:


On a side note, you should check out the film Solomon Kane if you haven't seen it. It's ostensibly set in 16th Century England or thereabouts, but could just as easily be the story of the son of an Elector Count returning after wars in distant lands to find a Chaos Cult in his former lands, leading to much ass-kicking, swordplay and more than a few awesome hats. There's even a Demon that bears quite the resemblance to a Bloodthirster at one point.

It also tanked. According to Wikipedia, that movie cost some 40 Million USD to make, and according to Box Office Mojo, it made about 19 Million USD worldwide.

Yeah, I'm not saying it's a financial hit, just that, as a film its bloody good and worth watching to get a feel of what a WFB film could be like. It is a shame it bombed, as I believe there was a sequel in the works.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Except GW has had multiple opportunities to sell their IP to others. People have approached them with deals for every type of media. GW is just full of control freaks who want total control over their IP that nobody can work with them.

GW could make tons of money, but they're absolute morons.

I don't thing GW ever turned down an opportunity to sell their IP in the entire history of the company. Quite the opposite. They seem to be more than happy to let every other software freshmen make a gakky browser or phone-game for their IP these days. They actually should be a bit more discerning IMO:

Does WHFB even have a story worth telling?

GoT has a massive budget and still the series could be called "Game of avoiding battles from the books". Considering the outlandish ways they have used to skip almost all the battles in the books so far.

Considering the WHFB fluff I have read is mostly battle after battle after battle after battle it wouldn't work even if they had GoT's budget.

How small is GW, I can buy or sell 100 - 500 shares and make the stock price change, that's how small. I think we, as gamers/hobbyists, sometimes lose site of exactly how small-potatoes 40K and WHFB is in the grand scheme of things.

Plus, what Bottle said, most of the BL novels read like fan-spank and the fluff is regurgitated from a condensed variety of established sources. Nothing in either universe is actually new to the world so little point in advertising to the general populace how stale your house writers really are and how trite your made-up universe really is.

More than anything else, I think if fans saw GW's IP made "flesh" on the big or small screen, they'd realize how silly (in a not funny way) it all is. It's different put in the context of a game or short novel but try to take it bigger and you wind up with something like the old D&D cartoon from my youth. I tried to watch an episode recently and I was thinking, "Why would I ever have liked this?"

 Bottle wrote:
Does WHFB even have a story worth telling?

GoT has a massive budget and still the series could be called "Game of avoiding battles from the books". Considering the outlandish ways they have used to skip almost all the battles in the books so far.

Considering the WHFB fluff I have read is mostly battle after battle after battle after battle it wouldn't work even if they had GoT's budget.

Malus Darkblade, Gotrek and Felix, Gilles Le Breton, and many others have fantastically wonderful stories that take place both on and off battlefields.


In fact, every character has a story, and they're all interesting. Apart from Karl Franz. Who's personality is that he has a hammer.

Malus Darkblade was interesting as a comic series, and the first two 'books' of that were basically 'Malus fights a monster or demon and then goes on looking for his soul'. The overwrought novel adaptation actually brought that down a couple of notches.

Gotrek, entertaining as he was, was basically the same; only looking for his doom rather than his soul. And that too was back when he was good, written by a different author. Everything else was Felix sulking along after him.

 Vermis wrote:
Malus Darkblade was interesting as a comic series, and the first two 'books' of that were basically 'Malus fights a monster or demon and then goes on looking for his soul'. The overwrought novel adaptation actually brought that down a couple of notches.

Gotrek, entertaining as he was, was basically the same; only looking for his doom rather than his soul. And that too was back when he was good, written by a different author. Everything else was Felix sulking along after him.

You say that, but they have actual character to them, unlike Batman. And look how popular he is.

If the Dark Knight trilogy has taught us anything, it's that the titular character only needs to feature in name to appease the masses.

YMMV but every single one of those characters is very one-dimensional and mary-sue in nature. All BL books read like the lone swordsman somehow wading through infinite hordes of enemies unscathed....yeah, fan-spank. Malus in particular gets a medallion that protects him from all magic that is conveniently destroyed in one shot by the demon he's fighting. *yawn* Gotrek is an unkillable dwarf-slayer and Gilles somehow beats a horde of orcs outnumbered something like 1billion to one (hyperbole intended).

I mean if reading these kinds of stories is your thing, yay. But you have to admit that none of that would make good TV or a good movie.

I never did get the love for Gotrek. The first few short stories were interesting, but after that, he got very formulaic. Gotrek grumps drunkenly into some new situation, Felix tags along and comments on the irony, they meet some new people, Felix sleeps with one of them, Gotrek butchers his way through everything and the cycle continues. Not nearly as much character as Batsy when he's done well, I'd argue Thanquol was kinda fun, though.

...I realize that I keep drawing from the Skarsnik well, but I think that might make an entertaining animated show. If WHF got something like that, anyway. A pitch-black comedy following his rise to power with a lot of vicious gobbo skulduggery and so forth...it'd capture the feel of the setting pretty nicely, be quite different from various other fantasy stories (in that it's following a villain and isn't even about humans), and the source material isn't just massive battle after massive battle.

Wonderwolf wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Except GW has had multiple opportunities to sell their IP to others. People have approached them with deals for every type of media. GW is just full of control freaks who want total control over their IP that nobody can work with them.

GW could make tons of money, but they're absolute morons.

I don't thing GW ever turned down an opportunity to sell their IP in the entire history of the company. Quite the opposite. They seem to be more than happy to let every other software freshmen make a gakky browser or phone-game for their IP these days. They actually should be a bit more discerning IMO:

Its more like people have asked to use their IP and GW has had such suffocating terms of use that they retract the offers.

 Grey Templar wrote:


Its more like people have asked to use their IP and GW has had such suffocating terms of use that they retract the offers.

Example?

 agnosto wrote:
YMMV but every single one of those characters is very one-dimensional and mary-sue in nature. All BL books read like the lone swordsman somehow wading through infinite hordes of enemies unscathed....yeah, fan-spank. Malus in particular gets a medallion that protects him from all magic that is conveniently destroyed in one shot by the demon he's fighting. *yawn* Gotrek is an unkillable dwarf-slayer and Gilles somehow beats a horde of orcs outnumbered something like 1billion to one (hyperbole intended).

I mean if reading these kinds of stories is your thing, yay. But you have to admit that none of that would make good TV or a good movie.

As opposed to any other High Fantasy setting where the hero overcomes unsurmountable odds with plot device #123456789.

 thedarkavenger wrote:

 agnosto wrote:
YMMV but every single one of those characters is very one-dimensional and mary-sue in nature. All BL books read like the lone swordsman somehow wading through infinite hordes of enemies unscathed....yeah, fan-spank. Malus in particular gets a medallion that protects him from all magic that is conveniently destroyed in one shot by the demon he's fighting. *yawn* Gotrek is an unkillable dwarf-slayer and Gilles somehow beats a horde of orcs outnumbered something like 1billion to one (hyperbole intended).

I mean if reading these kinds of stories is your thing, yay. But you have to admit that none of that would make good TV or a good movie.

As opposed to any other High Fantasy setting where the hero overcomes unsurmountable odds with plot device #123456789.

My point exactly. For something to be successful on the screen or tv it'll have to break from that and nothing that BL and GW makes even comes close.

 agnosto wrote:


My point exactly. For something to be successful on the screen or tv it'll have to break from that and nothing that BL and GW makes even comes close.

Not really, because 99 out of 100 successful cinema/tv-shows in the fantasy/sci-fi/superhero-corner didn't break from that formula.

The problem is, you don't need to pay GW for the privilege of a Mary Sue-storyline, when you can either make up one yourself ... say ... Avatar, or get one from .. say ... Marvel/DC Comics or somebody like this, where it comes with a gazillion times more name recognition.

Someone would insist on trying to work in every plot element and then try and make it PG13 and we'd end up with an unintelligible mess.

 Spinner wrote:

...I realize that I keep drawing from the Skarsnik well, but I think that might make an entertaining animated show. If WHF got something like that, anyway. A pitch-black comedy following his rise to power with a lot of vicious gobbo skulduggery and so forth...

That's what made the later Darkblade comics so entertaining. It was like a primer for GoT before I knew what GoT was.

I imagine the Mike Lee versions were bulked out with about seventy-two pages of shrugging.

Wonderwolf wrote:

 agnosto wrote:


My point exactly. For something to be successful on the screen or tv it'll have to break from that and nothing that BL and GW makes even comes close.

Not really, because 99 out of 100 successful cinema/tv-shows in the fantasy/sci-fi/superhero-corner didn't break from that formula.

The problem is, you don't need to pay GW for the privilege of a Mary Sue-storyline, when you can either make up one yourself ... say ... Avatar, or get one from .. say ... Marvel/DC Comics or somebody like this, where it comes with a gazillion times more name recognition.

True too. But then, another point is that formulaic shows fail. I know people worship Firefly but it failed for a reason, it was cowboys in space which people had seen before. Heroes had an interesting, un-tired premise until the writers started throwing the usual tropes in. Only so many shows like that can be successful at any given time. A WHFB show would be too much like Grimm meets Game of Thrones; I don't think people would watch it.

 agnosto wrote:
I know people worship Firefly but it failed for a reason, it was cowboys in space which people had seen before.

Also: Whedonspeak.

Sean Bean to be cast as Karl Franz. Wait, should I spoiler that, given End Times lore vs. Sean Bean role?

I would imagine that the reason Firefly got canceled was closer to Fox airing everything out of order, putting it in a terrible timeslot and dropping episodes... <_<

But that, uh, that would be off-topic.

I would love an animated series for warhammer, the setting is huge so there's no shortage in possible stories to be used.

First of all GoT is good writing that has an intricate plot and great characters. Warhammer fiction is all the same plot; kill, kill, kill and the characters are one dimensional. Not to mention hardly any female characters.

Which brings us to the next reason GoT is popular, it has sex. Lots and lots of sex and bewbs. Warhammer is written for 13 year old boys who are afraid of boobs. ( or maybe that it is the grown men who write it are afraid of them).

Anyway, Warhammer fluff as it is would make for an awful. TV show. Now if some good writers were hired (not the hacks who write now) and the world and fluff was modified it could have potential.

I also think the whole everyone is evil and evil always wins, grim dark would fail in the mainstream.

Of course this is all moot since the whole Warhammer world is now destroyed.

Think the older fluff from the time of 3rd could make a decent mini series or two parter (think the sort of stuff done with Colour of Magic and a few others) - take a story and run with it.

Mostly because the older backgrounds seemed to have the darker, slightly more sarcastic edge and played with the cliches as opposed to just being them.

Not something that would be "amazing", but something the likes of the Asylum could work with - play up the cheese and ham the whole thing up and have fun with it.

Try to do it seriously, with a 'moral' behind it and nah.

Drachenfels I'd watch, perhaps also a series based on Doomstones - there is more to the background than the wargame, the RPG is a better source by miles.

Take the story, use CGI, unknown actors, don't pretend its a megamillions blockbuster but tell a decent story reasonably well and could be amusing.

Turning individual books or maybe a series of books into a movie or mini-series would be more doable. That is them selling the idea to a production company with a huge budget. The ip could really roll in some money with royalties on that but it takes, IMO, a larger fanbase to sell it to. The miniatures gaming community is too small.

The fluff from the 6e Empire book is well written. The part where it goes into the death of Marius Leitdorf would make a very good battle scene.

Saying that a Warhammer based TV show wouldn't work because there are no existing characters worth writing about is a bad argument. It's not like GoT where the characters are set in stone. It's a setting that's pretty open ended. You've got characters who can be made up on the spot, due to the fact that there are entire civilisations at war. And the series doesn't have to be at war. Look at LoTR. It's a similar prospect. A backdrop of a world at war, tracking the journey of a few friends.

All the series has to do is focus on the actions of a well written cast, on and off the battlefield, and it'd be a good series.