In the event that you are an old school games geek, this announcement will be just what the doctor ordered. Everyone else will be a bit baffled as to just what exactly Warhammer 40,000 is (no, it has nothing to do with World of Warcraft). However you feel about Warhammer, it's about to become a movie.
Warhammer 40,000 is a creation of the Games Workshop. The 40,000 stands for 40,000 AD, which is the point in the future when this game is supposed to take place. It's basically a tabletop game where players use miniature, painted metal figures that represent various armies. You've got the frightening Space Marines, the Eldar (which are more or less intergalactic elves), and the Orks.
The new Warhammer movie is going to focus on the Space Marines, a ferocious race of humans who've been dimented and mutated by their space lives and now wear gargantuan metal armor and annihilate anything in their path.
Ultramarines is a 70-minute sci-fi thriller that will use CGI and state-of-the-art animation production techniques. Games Workshop is delighted to be working with UK-based production company Codex Pictures, who have the momentous task of bringing the Warhammer 40,000 universe to the screen.
Commenting on the news, Erik Mogensen, Licensing and Acquired Rights Manager for Games Workshop, said, “Over the years, we have been approached again and again by all sorts of producers and film companies wanting to take our intellectual property to the screen. We have always believed that, in the right hands, the stories, themes and characters from the Warhammer 40,000 universe would lend themselves perfectly to the movie genre."
Warhammer geeks are having a geekgasm right about now.
Everyone else is just going to have to wait and see what these Space Marines are all about. But don't hold your breath for this to make it to the big screen -- this here movie's going straight to DVD. Which kind of makes sense. It's a very genre-y property targeted at a very specific audience. If it blows up on DVD maybe we'll see a sequel on the silver screen.
So dust off your nerd armies, Warhammer is coming this way.
Source: Hardy Fowler/Games Workshop
