(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
I once found myself in a Warhammer shop in Edinburgh. I’d travelled several hours to get to the beautiful Scottish city, so why had I been dragged into a Warhammer shop?
There’s nothing wrong with liking Warhammer – we all have our own preferred ways to relax after a long day – but it’s a rather niche hobby, you have to admit. It wasn’t too niche for Stanley Kubrick, though, who once expressed interest in making a film based on Warhammer 40,000.
The miniature wargame, which sees players paint their models before gameplay, is one of the most stereotypically nerdy games out there (no judgment here), with a shop in seemingly every town in the United Kingdom, no matter how small. Who says the high street’s dead? Maybe Warhammer shops are keeping it alive.
It’s hard to imagine Kubrick playing fucking Warhammer or the sci-fi variation, Warhammer 40,000, and that’s because he likely didn’t. However, he discovered the game when he was working with author Ian Watson on a different idea for a film, which led him to consider creating a sci-fi movie based on the popular wargame.
Watson and Kubrick were working on an adaptation of the short story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’, written by Brian Aldiss, which the filmmaker was keen to turn into his latest epic project. In the end, Kubrick discarded it and allowed Steven Spielberg to take over, resulting in 2001’s AI Artificial Intelligence.
Yet, during his creative partnership with Watson, Kubrick expressed interest in Warhammer 40,000, which had formed the basis for one of the author’s upcoming novels, Inquisitor. Watson has since written various books based on the Warhammer 40,000 universe, but Inquisitor was his first, and while it hadn’t yet been published when he told Kubrick about it, the director thought it had enough grounds to form the inspiration for a potential feature.
Writing about his experience of working with Kubrick, Watson revealed: “What a magpie Stanley was, seizing on whatever I might mention. A book I owned about The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: he must borrow it. Papal Indulgences, and I was faxing him information. I had written a novel entitled Inquisitor set in the wacky far-future world of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000; he wanted a pre-publication printout right away.”
Kubrick apparently loved the sound of this nerdy world full of supernatural characters. Watson continued, “‘Who knows, Ian?’, he mused. ‘Maybe this is my next movie?’ I arranged for Games Workshop to send him samples of their games and artwork, and obtained for him from fantasy artist Ian Miller a portfolio of drawings of monsters. Anything could be grist to the mill, now or at some future date.”
In the end, Kubrick ditched his idea for a Warhammer 40,000 film – as he ditched many other unrealised projects throughout his career – and focused on his final masterpiece instead, Eyes Wide Shut. He definitely made the right decision, because a Kubrick-directed Warhammer movie certainly didn’t need to exist.
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