Mike Flanagan Calls Writing Henry Cavill’s Warhammer 40K Series Brutally Difficult

Mike Flanagan has spent years bringing some of horror’s best-loved stories to the screen, from Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep to Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House. His latest King adaptation, Carrie, has earned rave reviews and is dominating streaming on Prime Video. His next big project may be his most daunting yet. He is bringing the sprawling science-fiction universe of Warhammer 40,000 to live action.

Flanagan discussed the Amazon project on The Process Unlocked podcast. He is developing it alongside star and executive producer Henry Cavill, and he described it as feeling like he’s “climbing my adaptation Everest.”

The hard part, he explained, is deciding where to begin. The franchise has decades of lore, hundreds of novels and thousands of years of fictional history, along with an enormous cast.

“These are novel lengths. These are not small. But there are so many characters. It takes place over so many thousands of years. There’s so much there,” he said. “The challenge is how do you get in? That’s really a brutally difficult adaptation, but it’s been so fun for it.”

What we know about the Warhammer 40,000 series

Cavill, a longtime fan of the tabletop franchise, is attached to star and executive produce Amazon’s live-action adaptation. Games Workshop confirmed in a July financial report that initial outlines had been completed and Flanagan was expected to move on to writing scripts. The company has cautioned that its screen adaptations will take years to reach audiences. Neither a release date nor specific storylines for the live-action series have been announced.

Flanagan has adapted dense fictional worlds before. He is also developing a television adaptation of King’s The Dark Tower, a fantasy saga that spans multiple novels and connects to the author’s wider fictional universe. Flanagan said King’s way of introducing readers to that world makes it easier to find a starting point.

He pointed to the opening of The Gunslinger, the first Dark Tower novel. It begins with a simple premise: a gunslinger pursuing a man in black across a desert. King gradually builds out the larger mythology from there.

“Seventy percent of my job is done for me by Steve,” Flanagan said of adapting King. “Warhammer is not like that.”

Games Workshop created the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It is set in a brutal far future where humanity faces alien civilizations, demonic forces and seemingly endless warfare. Its stories span novels, tabletop games, video games and other media, which leaves Flanagan an enormous amount of material to navigate.

His horror background could suit a universe known for grotesque monsters, religious fanaticism and cosmic terror. Beyond Warhammer 40,000, his upcoming projects include DC Studios’ Clayface and a new Exorcist film. His Dark Tower adaptation remains in development.

For now, the biggest question is how Flanagan will distill the mythology of Warhammer 40,000 into a story that works for longtime fans and newcomers alike. His comments make clear that finding the entry point is one of the hardest parts of the job.

Related: To reinvent Carrie, Mike Flanagan needed ‘one of the best actors I’ve ever met’

Source: Polygon