Years after Amazon signed a live-action Warhammer 40,000 deal, that project still has no finished script. The animated version, meanwhile, already has a director, two executive producers and a studio behind it.
According to a Variety report, Amazon MGM Studios, Blur Studios and Games Workshop are working on an animated TV adaptation of the sci-fi franchise. The show grows out of the Warhammer 40K entry in Secret Level, the Prime Video anthology series.
That episode was directed by Dave Wilson, who returns in the same job for the animated series and also holds a co-creator credit on it.
Cavill is on board, and that answers a question fans had
Henry Cavill — a well-documented Warhammer 40K fan already attached to live action adaptations of the game — comes aboard as an executive producer.
That credit carries more weight here than a producer billing normally would. Games Workshop CEO Kevin Rountree confirmed during a recent financial report that Cavill remains involved, after the silence surrounding the project had led fans to suspect the actor had walked away.
Rountree had less encouraging news about the live-action side. Games Workshop said its creative team is only now getting close to writing a script, several years on from the deal Amazon struck for the rights to the property.
Secret Level’s crew keeps showing up
Wilson isn’t the only holdover. Tim Miller, the creator of Secret Level, will executive produce the animated project as well.
Blur Studios, co-founded by Miller, helped produce the anthology and is attached to this one too. In other words, the animated Warhammer show is coming from roughly the same team that made the 12-minute version of it.
Every installment of Secret Level was based on a different video game. That’s how Concord — a shooter Sony pulled from sale in under two weeks — wound up immortalized in CG.
What we don’t know yet
No release window. No cast. No episode count. Nothing on which corner of the 40K setting the series will cover, beyond its tie to the Secret Level short.
Games Workshop has licensed this property for years without a great deal to show for it on screen. An animated spinoff with the original episode’s director attached is as close to momentum as the franchise has come, and it remains a project with a director and a logline rather than a trailer.