SUNDAY MUSINGS - BLOODQUEST AND WHAT CAME AFTER
There’s a fair few little mysteries in the tabletop hobby, as there are in any form of franchise that’s existed for as long as GW has. Mysteries may be the wrong word, really, as there is usually evidence enough to show the shape of such forgotten plots and plans that long fell to business decisions, changing priorities and the general passage of time. These aren’t half remembered forum posts about something somebody’s mate once saw at Games Day, but actual concepts with scripts, roadmaps and people being paid real money to bring them to life. Let’s take a look back to the turn of the millennium and the moment where Bloodquest nearly made the jump from page to screen, because the story of what happened to it tells us rather a lot about the problems Games Workshop had in trying to put 40K onto a screen.
Let’s go back to 1998, and Warhammer Monthly, which was GW’s attempt to expand both its fictional universes and its very real footprint through the medium of a monthly comic. Bloodquest comes out the gate very early on as a major player in its stable, created by writer Gordon Rennie and artist Colin MacNeil. We follow Captain Leonatos of the Blood Angels, who experiences multiple failures and losses, becoming exiled in the process, before setting off with his ragtag band of survivors to find and return the Blade Encarmine to his Chapter and restore his honour. There’s much adventure, multiple books covering a story that ranges from the Xenos of 40K being cut down to finding a Daemon World and having to fight through that, and it’s rip-roaring stuff.* It also looked absolutely bloody fantastic.
Colin MacNeil’s artwork made Bloodquest look like a film already. The Marines were huge and brutal, the Orks looked genuinely unpleasant and the environments had that particular late-1990s Games Workshop mixture of gothic architecture, industrial machinery and religious imagery which made everything appear to have been designed by somebody who had been told they could have as many skulls as they wanted and had interpreted this as a challenge. The timing was also rather convenient, because CGI was suddenly becoming the future. Toy Story had demonstrated that an entirely computer-generated feature could work, A Bug’s Life and Antz followed, Shrek was approaching and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was preparing to demonstrate just how much money could be spent making digital people look slightly uncomfortable. For Games Workshop, the opportunity was fairly obvious. If computer animation could make almost anything move, perhaps it could finally make the 40K artwork move as well. In April 2000 Exile Films announced that it had permission from Games Workshop to develop a CGI adaptation of Bloodquest, and for a while it genuinely looked like this might actually happen.
The surviving material is fascinating because you can see the intention immediately, even if the primitive nature of the animation now looks considerably more Dire Straits than ReBoot. It’s very easy to look at an old CGI teaser twenty-five years later and dismiss it, but a teaser and a film are two very different things. A drawing of a Space Marine is relatively inexpensive. A digital Space Marine has to be modelled, textured, animated and rendered. A drawing of a gothic cathedral costs whatever the artist’s hourly rate is, whereas a digital gothic cathedral requires a small army of people and several computers that are about to become obsolete. Then you have to add Orks, vehicles, battles, planets and the general requirement that all of these things actually move, and suddenly that £25 million budget starts looking rather less extravagant.
There was also the problem of selling Warhammer 40,000 to people who didn’t already know what it was, because the Imperium wasn’t exactly a conventional heroic civilisation. Its heroes were genetically engineered religious super-soldiers wearing several hundred kilos of armour and carrying weapons which fired miniature rockets into people, while their government was a vast authoritarian theocracy whose solution to most problems was shooting them, burning them, arresting them or occasionally doing all three. This was precisely what made 40K interesting, but it wasn’t necessarily what made it easy to sell as a conventional Hollywood adventure. The audience needed to understand enough of the setting to care about what was happening, without somebody having to sit them down for three hours and explain ten thousand years of Imperial history before Leonatos had even picked up his sword.
The Bloodquest story itself also had to be compressed, and that was probably just as big a problem as the CGI. A comic can wander through the universe. It can introduce characters, move somewhere else, spend an issue dealing with something apparently unrelated and then return to the original plot several months later. A film has to have a beginning, middle and end, which is frankly very inconsiderate of it. Characters have to be reduced, locations consolidated and the enormous quantity of 40K background turned into something a person who had never opened a Codex could understand. The more you tried to explain, the more complicated it became, but the more you removed, the less it looked like the thing you were trying to sell. For a while, however, it looked as though Exile might actually manage it. White Dwarf continued to cover the project and, as late as early 2003, reports suggested that production was substantially advanced, with interest from studios and Hollywood figures. This wasn’t some mythical lost project that existed only in the imagination of Games Workshop fans; there was a real production trying to make the jump from development to finished film. Then, in March 2003, it went on indefinite hold, and that was effectively that.
The project disappeared, Exile Films eventually vanished from the story and Bloodquest became one of those strange pieces of hobby history that periodically resurfaces whenever somebody discovers an old trailer on the internet and wonders what the hell happened to it. For Games Workshop, though, the experience can’t have been entirely wasted. If anything, Bloodquest demonstrated how difficult the obvious route to a 40K movie actually was. The setting was visually spectacular but expensive, the stories were enormous but difficult to compress, the audience was relatively small but knowledgeable enough to notice when something was wrong, and the financial model required a substantial outside investment in a property which, despite having a very dedicated following, was still fundamentally a tabletop game.
The following years changed the situation. Black Library expanded, 40K fiction became increasingly important and computer games brought the setting to a much wider audience. Dawn of War demonstrated the effectiveness of 40K’s visual language in computer-generated cinematics, while writers such as Dan Abnett showed that stories could be told within the setting without requiring the reader to know every obscure corner of Imperial history. Then, in 2009, Games Workshop announced another 40K film, only unfortunately this time it was Ultramarines.
The production philosophy was almost the exact opposite of Bloodquest. Developed by Codex Pictures with Good Story Productions and POP6 Studios, directed by Martyn Pick and written by Dan Abnett, Ultramarines was an original story rather than an adaptation of an existing comic. It was made as a roughly seventy-minute direct-to-DVD production rather than an ambitious theatrical epic, and instead of attempting to show the galaxy it concentrated on a small group of Space Marines responding to a distress signal. The project had apparently gone through a lengthy development process, with producer Bob Thompson describing several years of work and numerous different story concepts being considered before the final version emerged, with around twenty ideas reportedly explored. That is probably more revealing than it first appears, because Games Workshop was no longer simply asking how to make 40K into a film but instead what sort of 40K story could actually be made into a film.
Unfortunately, the answer was fairly terrible, but compared with what Bloodquest had aimed to be, it was a very minimalist attempt. There was no need to explain the history of the Blood Angels, no Blade Encarmine, no sprawling quest across the galaxy and no requirement to explain why one particular Chapter had a particular psychological problem involving its dead Primarch. The film could simply establish that these were Space Marines, this was an Imperial world and somebody had sent a distress signal. That’s quite a lot easier to get your head around if you’re the poor sod who has never encountered Warhammer before.
Abnett’s involvement mattered for much the same reason. By this point he had demonstrated that Games Workshop’s worlds could support proper narrative fiction, but he also understood the practical difference between a novel and a film. A novelist can introduce twenty characters and give them several pages of background. A filmmaker has to make sure the audience can tell who is who when ten Space Marines walk into a room wearing identical armour. So Ultramarines approached the problem from the other direction: make the story smaller, make it self-contained, use an original narrative, concentrate on a limited group of characters, keep the production manageable and, most importantly, don’t try to put the entire 41st Millennium onto the screen at once.
Bloodquest was Games Workshop’s first serious attempt to discover whether 40K could support a feature-length CGI film, and it tried to solve the problem through scale, technology and outside financing. Ultramarines approached the same problem from the opposite direction by reducing the scale, simplifying the story and containing the characters, keeping the setting recognisable without attempting to explain all of it. In a strange way, the two projects represent opposite answers to exactly the same question: how much 40K can you actually get away with putting on screen before the setting itself becomes the problem?
Games Workshop had discovered that spectacular artwork wasn’t enough. It discovered that the 40K universe was too enormous to throw at a general audience in one sitting, that CGI was expensive enough to kill a project long before anybody had to worry about whether the finished film was any good, and that if it wanted 40K on screen it needed to be considerably more careful about how much of the universe it attempted to put there. Bloodquest had tried to bring the whole bloody thing with it. Ultramarines tried to leave most of it off screen. Neither really got it right, but the important thing is that the question didn’t disappear. It just became a matter of working out what you could leave out while still leaving enough behind for the thing to feel like 40K.
And perhaps that’s the really interesting thing about Bloodquest. It wasn’t some fantasy Games Workshop once had about making a film. There was a real production company, real money, real artwork, real development and a genuine attempt to make a 40K story move. The project got close enough to leave behind surviving material which still gives us a glimpse of what might have been, and while it ultimately vanished into development hell, the problem it exposed never really went away. You don’t need to show the whole Imperium, you don’t need to explain ten thousand years of history and you certainly don’t need to introduce every Primarch, Chapter, alien race and vaguely unpleasant thing that lives under a rock on Armageddon. You need one good story, enough of the universe around it that the story feels like 40K, and then hopefully enough left unseen that somebody watching it wonders what the hell else is out there.
Bloodquest tried to make the universe itself the spectacle. Ultramarines tried to make a small story inside that universe the spectacle. The fact that Games Workshop kept returning to the problem suggests that perhaps neither approach was entirely right, but the Bloodquest project still matters because it was one of the first occasions where somebody actually tried to answer the question properly. It turns out that making a Space Marine stand on a page is considerably easier than making the bastard walk.**
As always, I remain,
Adam
* Which is the polite way of saying people stopped answering the phone.
** MVP.
*** If you listen to WHAM! you know I’ve apologised for my wrong-headedness multiple times.
**Technically I’ve now spent far too much time thinking about Space Marines walking. This is what happens when you give me an hour and a half.