What the title says, so far only the Hollywood Reporter has reported it but I'm hopping it's true.
If this isn't true (YET) Amazon better make it happen just give Henry Cavill total control & you have a blockbuster.
Now excuse me while I go change my underwear it's soggy, sticky and cold.
On one hand, Cavill is a pretty solid fan of works and takes them seriously (he left The Witcher when it started to deviate too far from the established backstory and lore).
On the other hand, Amazon. Nuff said.
Here's that Hollywood Reporter article:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/henry-cavill-warhammer-40000-amazon-1235283251/ (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/henry-cavill-warhammer-40000-amazon-1235283251/)
This is more of a statement of intention than a solid announcement. No contracts exist.
My guess is that Cavill floated a suggestion to Amazon and they said "sure," but the gears are just starting to turn.
Cavill has a bunch of other upcoming projects listed on his IMDB, including a rumored remake of Highlander.
(I'd love to see Cavill play the Kurgan...)
Quote from: Lurkndog on December 16, 2022, 10:19:22 AM
Here's that Hollywood Reporter article:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/henry-cavill-warhammer-40000-amazon-1235283251/ (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/henry-cavill-warhammer-40000-amazon-1235283251/)
This is more of a statement of intention than a solid announcement. No contracts exist.
My guess is that Cavill floated a suggestion to Amazon and they said "sure," but the gears are just starting to turn.
Cavill has a bunch of other upcoming projects listed on his IMDB, including a rumored remake of Highlander.
(I'd love to see Cavill play the Kurgan...)
Oh ye of little faith
Quote from: GeekyBugle on December 16, 2022, 02:09:54 PM
Oh ye of little faith
It's a
dare I hope? situation.
He's saying all the right words. And I know he's actually into it.
Quote from: Thornhammer on December 16, 2022, 11:49:18 PM
Quote from: GeekyBugle on December 16, 2022, 02:09:54 PM
Oh ye of little faith
It's a dare I hope? situation.
He's saying all the right words. And I know he's actually into it.
It's just a matter of how much creative control he has.
It looks like Amazon isn't producing, only distributing, which is a good thing, only time will tell if Cavill has the power needed to steer the ship to a good port.
Amazon HAS secured the rights, so it is happening!
https://twitter.com/IGN/status/1603734186971521024 (https://twitter.com/IGN/status/1603734186971521024)
Quote from: Ghostmaker on December 16, 2022, 09:12:13 AM
On one hand, Cavill is a pretty solid fan of works and takes them seriously (he left The Witcher when it started to deviate too far from the established backstory and lore).
On the other hand, Amazon. Nuff said.
The thing with Amazon though... they also made Reacher and the series with Chris Pratt. I am not sure they operate as a hive mind with their green lights and it comes down to who gets the gig. I think it being more obscure to "suits" 40k has a decent shot of having people less interested in "reimagining" and just putting out some decent entertainment.
Quote from: oggsmash on December 17, 2022, 05:46:38 AM
Quote from: Ghostmaker on December 16, 2022, 09:12:13 AM
On one hand, Cavill is a pretty solid fan of works and takes them seriously (he left The Witcher when it started to deviate too far from the established backstory and lore).
On the other hand, Amazon. Nuff said.
The thing with Amazon though... they also made Reacher and the series with Chris Pratt. I am not sure they operate as a hive mind with their green lights and it comes down to who gets the gig. I think it being more obscure to "suits" 40k has a decent shot of having people less interested in "reimagining" and just putting out some decent entertainment.
I get the impression that Amazon works more like a traditional TV network, where a lot of the content is produced by outside studios. Like Desilu producing the original Star Trek for NBC.
That's a good thing, I think.
I've seen Warcraft fans call for him to play Arthas in an Arthas tv show/movie. I can see that going bad very fast. Almost no adaptations can live up to their source material, much less surpass it. Stories in video games are as irrelevant as stories in porn, so video game story quality in general is very low or outright nonexistent. This is why most video game adaptations are bad. The actual writing in Warcraft 3 (and other Blizz games) is mediocre and only held up by the nostalgia of people who played it as ten year olds.
To whit, the plot of WC3 could have been completely averted if the mad prophet at the beginning stopped acting mysterious for the audience's sake and actually told people that he knew that demons were plotting an invasion and needed a specific book in Dalaran to open the gates of hell. Instead he tells the king to evacuate the entire continent to another continent on the other side of the world that they've never heard of before, provides no reason to do so beyond "do what I say or else", then acts surprised when nobody takes him seriously.
This is the sort of writing I expect from typical fantasy schlock. Awful books like that are everywhere, but they rarely get big budget adaptations because everyone knows how bad they are.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 19, 2022, 01:14:19 PM
I've seen Warcraft fans call for him to play Arthas in an Arthas tv show/movie. I can see that going bad very fast. Almost no adaptations can live up to their source material, much less surpass it. Stories in video games are as irrelevant as stories in porn, so video game story quality in general is very low or outright nonexistent.
Representatives ranging from "Planescape: Torment" to "The Last of Us" just called. Actually, the current fear is that they fuck up "The Last of Us" series, because the first game was a masterpiece but the second sucked ass.
Generally speaking, videogame adaptations were seldom good because the source material was seldom approached seriously, like it happened with superhero movies. Only when movies like "Blade", the first two X-Men and EDIT: "Spiderman" by Sam Raimi started appearing the studios understood the potential of the genre.
Regarding Amazon, it is important to remember how Amazon Prime and Amazon Studios are two different entities. Amazon Studios is the hot zone of wokeness that gifted us "The Rings of Power" and "The Wheel of Time", Amazon Prime is Amazon's streaming outlet (actually part of your Prime subscriptions, which includes from eCommerce services to Audible). I'm quite happy with my Prime subscription, as it offers tons of content (for example, with Prime Italy I was able to catch up with a lot of Italian classic movies unavailable elsewhere). As long as Amazon Studios and the current woke bee-Queen Jennifer Salke are not part of this project there is hope.
Quote from: Reckall on December 20, 2022, 07:21:41 AM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 19, 2022, 01:14:19 PM
I've seen Warcraft fans call for him to play Arthas in an Arthas tv show/movie. I can see that going bad very fast. Almost no adaptations can live up to their source material, much less surpass it. Stories in video games are as irrelevant as stories in porn, so video game story quality in general is very low or outright nonexistent.
Representatives ranging from "Planescape: Torment" to "The Last of Us" just called. Actually, the current fear is that they fuck up "The Last of Us" series, because the first game was a masterpiece but the second sucked ass.
Generally speaking, videogame adaptations were seldom good because the source material was seldom approached seriously, like it happened with superhero movies. Only when movies like "Blade", the first two X-Men and "Superman" by Sam Raimi started appearing the studios understood the potential of the genre.
Regarding Amazon, it is important to remember how Amazon Prime and Amazon Studios are two different entities. Amazon Studios is the hot zone of wokeness that gifted us "The Rings of Power" and "The Wheel of Time", Amazon Prime is Amazon's streaming outlet (actually part of your Prime subscriptions, which includes from eCommerce services to Audible). I'm quite happy with my Prime subscription, as it offers tons of content (for example, with Prime Italy I was able to catch up with a lot of Italian classic movies unavailable elsewhere). As long as Amazon Studios and the current woke bee-Queen Jennifer Salke are not part of this project there is hope.
I didn't say nor imply there were no video games that can be considered equivalent to literature. Of course,
Planescape: Torment is something of a cheat because it has over a million words of text in its script. You'd be better off using
Legacy of Kain as an example, as lead writer Amy Hennig was able to juggle philosophy, time travel, morality, religion, etc without falling apart (much).
The plot of Warcraft is nowhere near that level. There are very few adaptations that actually improve on their source material, and the best adaptations normally barely meet the standard set by the source material. Warcraft's plot is hackneyed, cliched, schlocky, relies on characters acting like idiots, etc. Most video games players, especially if they were children at the time, don't notice the bad writing and form nostalgic memories that last into adulthood because the gameplay is what mattered. In passive media, you can't rely on gameplay to hold up a bad story. You can't rely on colorful presentation and cgi anymore. The story itself needs to be good, or at least not stupid.
Audiences are going to notice the problems in the story and will criticize it. Especially when you'd have to stretch ~40 minutes of cutscenes (https://youtu.be/ekUCh1gotVc) into a coherent plot across at least seven hours of the first season alone, and the writing quality only declines from there. The most that the human campaign story has going for it is the pathos from Arthas' tragic descent into darkness, but that's undercut by the fact that the characters make the most obviously idiotic decisions they can make at the time in order to move the plot along. Medivh in particular just expects people to listen to him despite never providing any compelling reasons to, even though he could easily just share his intel on the Burning Legion. In the undead campaign, Arthas becomes a generic soulless villain with no motivation other than obeying what the NPCs order him to do. To add insult to injury, this applies to the undead as a whole. The purpose of their campaign was to open the gates of hell to let demons thru, then once the demons won they'd be discarded. (For reference, this was not the original plan and it was changed to this after the demon campaign had to be cut. The original plan was apparently that the undead would try to take over the world, altho no scripts were ever written.) Arthas makes a cameo in the night elf campaign telling Illidan about the Skull of Guldan, but that's all the undead do to try avoiding their own destruction. It is not a satisfying story unless you played it as a ten year old two decades ago and still have nostalgia goggles.
I do not envy the writers who have to write the adaptation. You could take the basic premise and make a good story out of it by just ignoring the canon, as some fanficcers have done, but if they don't adhere to the canon then fans will be livid. But if they do adhere to canon then the story will be terrible and fans will complain anyway, which seems to be the most likely outcome in reality.
Of course, it will be fun to see armchair writers on youtube try to rewrite the show to make sense and try to juggle that will adhering to the game canon. I predict we'll see a lot of flame wars between armchairs who don't care about canon and those who try to fruitlessly justify that the canon plot could ever work.
If Cavil is smart, then he'll just stick to 40k. 40k canon is officially described as unreliable narratives to excuse all the inconsistencies, so he has a lot of free reign to tell original stories that utilize the setting without being beholden to bad writing.
My point isn't that adapting video games is easy. I'm simply saying that in terms of characters, worldbuilding and plots many games aren't like "porn": you have all the elements needed for a good movie or - often better yet - a streaming series. It is the approach that still has to become adult, not the opportunities.
Just looking at the games I played recently (I catched up with some of them after years) I can see how good products could be adapted from titles ranging from "Horizon: Zero Dawn" to the most recent slate of "Metal Gear Solid" games. Many titles in the "Far Cry" franchise offer a lot of opportunities for adaptation. "Outlast" could become a nice horror and so on. The opportunities are endless.
Looking back, "Silent Hill" was fine (the sequel was a crock) but "Silent Hill 2" (the game) has one of those plots that could obliterate 90% of the horror movies out there. I liked a lot the first "Resident Evil" (and, in recent years, it has been re-evaluated a lot - especially after the woke garbage RE has become these days). There was no reason as why "Prince of Persia" or "Assassin's Creed" should automatically have been bad movies (AC is the blueprint for a great streaming series, just center it on Ezio Auditore) - except that the videogame medium is still not approached with the needed seriousness.
I don't consider "World of Warcraft" (and Warcraft in general) to be good examples. They boast big names but the strength is the worldbuilding, not the plot. For the same reason I would see a "Skyrim" miniseries as an original story set in Skyrim, not as the adaptation of the anaemic plot that ties things together. Way back, however, I turned the classic "Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire" into a GURPS campaign and, once again, I don't see a reason as why it cannot become a good series - because all the elements are there.
All the above just to say that, no, a lot of videogames offer the opportunity for excellent narrative adaptations and we have proof that sometimes it happened. I stay my opinion that the medium is still underestimated. Maybe "The Last of Us" will turn things around. We can only hope: the risk for woke garbage is, sadly, still high.
Warcraft's worldbuilding is a mess, not a strength. The writers made it up over the course of decades and as you would expect it doesn't fit together. Originally the franchise was about orcs and humans fighting, now you have Marvel's celestials imported to fight cosmic wars with demons, void lords, death lords and shit.
I get that every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to be Tolkien, but they always fail because they don't understand why Tolkien's work is good and enduring. There are at least two reasons for this that modern writers never use themselves: firstly, Tolkien wrote his work around specific themes; and secondly, Tolkien's work has a beginning, middle, and end. Modern writers make shit up as they go based on superficial cool factor and mindlessly imitating the greats, rather than because they have anything to say.
Has Cavill produced anything of note? As far as I can see in IMDB, he has only ever worked as an actor.
Maybe he'll turn out to be a good producer, but it seems like a roll of the dice at this point.
Quote from: jhkim on December 21, 2022, 02:09:00 PM
Has Cavill produced anything of note? As far as I can see in IMDB, he has only ever worked as an actor.
Maybe he'll turn out to be a good producer, but it seems like a roll of the dice at this point.
Ideally, he would bring on someone he's worked with before to do the day to day work as show runner.
If Cavill is a longtime fan of 40K, he may at least have an outline of what he wants to adapt from the existing lore. And he's probably able to serve as an evangelist for the game, someone who can run some game sessions for the staff until they get it.
Beyond that, one hopes he has kept his eyes open for the last 20 years.
Quote from: jhkim on December 21, 2022, 02:09:00 PM
Has Cavill produced anything of note? As far as I can see in IMDB, he has only ever worked as an actor.
Maybe he'll turn out to be a good producer, but it seems like a roll of the dice at this point.
(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQwJaYSrEPQUKakWevPYcwJ5x-PrH7_lzRXKNwZ1cyvsg&s)
Quote from: Ratman_tf on December 22, 2022, 04:12:58 AM
Quote from: jhkim on December 21, 2022, 02:09:00 PM
Has Cavill produced anything of note? As far as I can see in IMDB, he has only ever worked as an actor.
Maybe he'll turn out to be a good producer, but it seems like a roll of the dice at this point.
(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQwJaYSrEPQUKakWevPYcwJ5x-PrH7_lzRXKNwZ1cyvsg&s)
;D
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.
Well, Todd Howard tackled the topic in an interview with Lex Friedman - when he talked about the upcoming streaming series based on "Fallout" (and helmed by Jonathan Nolan).
Basically, he said that when Fallout 3 came out they were submerged by offers about turning the game into a movie - and these offers were usually based around "turning the plot of the game into a two hours movie".
So they passed (kudos that they didn't just grabbed the money). The point was that Fallout was a "world". Why not to choose a place and tell a tale around that place? Which is the approach that Jonathan Nolan apparently took.
Now, IMHO Howard is right. There is no reason as why a series based on "Fallout" couldn't become "The Walking Dead", with each new season introducing new places and characters. I hope that "The Last of Us" WON'T become TWD, as even the authors fumbled the ball by game 2. Anyway, you can find Howard's observations at 2:29:00 here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H9AAnV59ddE
I will note that Cavill's role will be executive producer, not director -- so I worry a bit less about it.
His choice of director will be interesting, though.
Oddly enough I'm curious now what Army he uses when he plays 40K.
It would be funny if the Executive Producer sided with the Orcs.
Quote from: Ruprecht on December 30, 2022, 05:59:24 PM
Oddly enough I'm curious now what Army he uses when he plays 40K.
It would be funny if the Executive Producer sided with the Orcs.
Adeptus Custodes Proff about the 40 seconds mark