Why have they not made any warhammer/warhammer 40000 films?

Question

Or have they..?

Answer 1

Well I personally am a Warhammer 40k fan, I have been looking and they havnt made any movies of it, but there are a LOT of user created movies such as http://www.gametrailers.com/player/userm...

I wish they would make a movie...maybe some day!

Answer 2

There are three contenders for the title "Warhammer 40,000 movie".  The first, with impressive production values but an abysmal plot, was produced as a marketing tool for Games Workshop in the 1990s.  Called "Inquisitor", it bore little resemblance to the novel of the same name (later re-titled "Draco" to disambiguate with the narrative strategy game *Inquisitor*) and was shown at successive Games Day events and, due to popular demand, was given a limited release on VHS.  Copies can change hands today for up to $200, but it's really nothing to write home about and isn't considered "canonical".

The next attempt was a CGI TV movie called "Bloodquest", loosely based on the Gordon Rennie comic of the same name (loosely in that it involved Blood Angels, but that was about the end of the resemblance).  After producing some impressive pre-production work on space battles, using the new Battlefleet gothic ship designs, the company doing the work ran out of money and the work was left unfinished.  I believe the material now resides in Games Workshop's vaults.

Finally, the fan-movie, Damnatus, was an epic endeavour by a handful of dedicated lunatics who channeled their own money (perhaps as much as $20,000) into this not-inconsequential effort.  Opinions of those who've seen it (it's in German, with subtitles) is that the quality of the acting is better than that in "Inquisitor", but not by much.  The CGI is excellent (professional quality) and many of the props are of a superior "cosplay" quality.  But the plot is thin and the script of amateur standard (which isn't unsurprising as it was an amaeur film).  Sadly, German copyright rules mean that it can never be distributed as GW won't permit distribution without receiving full artistic rights and German law doesn't allow an artist to completely concede artistic rights to his work, even where it is derivative from the work of another artist or corporation.

Still, their website is very interesting.

As to why there hasn't been a full-fat Warhammer or 40k movie, the answer resides in the last-but-one paragraph.  Hollywood movie-making requires a sharing of artistic rights, much as the Tolkein estate shared rights on Lord of the Rings with New Line Cinema (and then got into a fight about it).  GW won't share their IP with anyone, so no one gets to make a movie other than GW themselves (the Bloodquest movie got around this by selling GW a 51% controlling interest in the company - a strategy that left GW holding the debts with nothing but a few minutes of half-finished CGI to show for their effort).

Of course, this rule has been relaxed for computer games, but as a games-design company, one suspects that GW and THQ and others can talk the same language.  Whether anyone at GW can talk the same language as the movie industry seems doubtful...