Live-Action 'Warhammer 40,000' TV Show Coming From 'The Man In The High Castle' Creator
More than thirty years after the popular miniature wargame debuted, a big-budget, live-action Warhammer 40k TV show is in the works.
Frank Spotnitz, the creator of Amazon's alternate reality drama The Man in the High Castle, is developing a new futuristic fantasy series called Eisenhorn that's set within the epic game's sprawling universe. Learn more about it below.
According to Deadline, Spotnitz (who also wrote for The X-Files) will serve as the showrunner for Eisenhorn, which marks the first live-action TV show based on the novels, board games, and miniatures in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. I'd never really heard of this property before, but Warhammer 40,000 (or Warhammer 40k, if ya nasty) is a miniature wargame – players assemble and paint their own miniature figures and wage fictional battle on pre-sold terrain models or custom-made creations on a tabletop, rolling dice and simulating combat. Eisenhorn is set in the game's distant future world, when mankind has almost been wiped out. Here's the description of the story:
While humanity's armies wage unending war across a million battlefields, in the darkness, a secret conflict rages – fought by the agents of the Imperial Inquisition. Drawing from sci-fi, fantasy and crime genres, Eisenhorn will see Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn and his band of investigators fight to thwart the monstrous schemes of aliens, heretics and daemons before mankind's doom is sealed.
Author Dan Abnett wrote Xenox, Malleus, and Hereticus – collectively known as the Eisenhorn trilogy – with the first entry being published in the early 2000s. That trilogy is providing the basis for Spotnitz's TV series. Here's the description of his trilogy from the publisher's website, which may offer a few more hints at what to expect from the adaptation:
Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn is an Imperial inquisitor, one of the tireless defenders of humanity. With his warband he scourges the galaxy, walking in the shadows of darkness in order to root out heresy. When that heresy is found to infiltrate the hierarchy of the Imperium and the Inquisition itself, Eisenhorn must rely on himself alone to deal with it – even if it means making deals with the enemy and compromising everything he has ever believed in.
"We are delighted to collaborate with Games Workshop to develop the beloved visionary world of Warhammer 40,000 into a TV series," Spotnitz said in a statement. "Warhammer 40,000is steeped in rich and complex lore, with a myriad of traditions and stories that have accumulated over time in this thrilling and complex world, making it one of the most exciting properties to adapt for television audiences and the franchise's loyal global fanbase. There is nothing else like it on television, and we are incredibly excited to tap into our own experience creating imaginative, complex and compelling worlds to bring this incredible saga to the screen."
This series doesn't have a network or streaming home yet, but those details should be finalized soon. Whoever gets this sounds like they're going to be getting their own Game of Thrones-style saga, and it'll be interesting to see if general audiences are pulled into this world in the same way they were to Westeros.