Is Henry Cavill Building the Superhero Universe Stephen King Has Been Waiting For?

Stephen King has notes. Specifically: if your superhero is leveling half a city, we should probably see some blood. And if Hollywood won’t go there, he thinks Henry Cavill’s Warhammer project might.

King vs the bloodless superhero

Talking to The Times, King called out how clean most caped beatdowns are. His point: the scale of the destruction doesn’t match what’s on screen.

"If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see ... some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks but you never see any blood. And man, that’s wrong."

He’s not wrong. The big studios keep most of this stuff PG-13, which means lots of rubble, very little hemoglobin. Yes, Marvel has gone red before — the Deadpool movies and Wolverine’s bloodier outings prove they can push it when they want. But the general vibe is still sanitized. As Fortress of Solitude put it: "We don't see bones breaking. We don't see blood."

Enter Henry Cavill’s Warhammer 40K, which absolutely will spill some

King doesn’t need to wait forever for a pulp-to-paste fix. Henry Cavill is shepherding a Warhammer 40,000 cinematic universe with Prime Video, and that world isn’t exactly shy about viscera.

Quick primer if you’re new: Warhammer 40K is a sprawling sci-fi dystopia built on never-ending war, religious fanaticism, and existential dread. It’s not just gore for gore’s sake — it leans into cosmic horror — but the brutality is baked in.

• The lore is massive and messy (in a good way). Handle with care or it collapses.
• Think planet-wide bombardments and entire worlds wiped off the map.
• On the ground: limbs everywhere, bodies turned into abstract art by chainswords and worse.
• Iconic arcs like the Horus Heresy are basically nonstop catastrophe.

There’s even a Prime Video series called Secret Level that brushes up against the 40K vibe, hinting it’s more than just splatter — the tone swings into the cosmic and the bleak. Also worth noting: Prime Video isn’t squeamish. The Boys already goes full tilt on R-rated carnage, so a Cavill-led Warhammer show getting the same treatment is a safe bet. Amazon’s on a hot streak; if they do 40K right, King’s complaint might be handled out of the gate.

King on his own adaptations: show it or skip it

King also weighed in on the new take on The Long Walk and, unsurprisingly, pushed for the hard version.

"I said, if you’re not going to show it, don’t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie."

This tracks. The man who gave us a literal wall of blood in The Shining has never been precious about violence when the story calls for it. He’s also been here before: The Running Man started with him asking a simple, nasty question.

"I was thinking, 'What would it be like if there was a game show where people got killed?' You would have to presuppose a society that was kind of like Nineteen Eighty-Four, where you had blood and circuses."

Where this lands

King wants honesty about consequences, not blood for the sake of shock. Most superhero movies won’t go there. Warhammer 40K will. If Cavill and Prime Video commit to the source’s ugly, operatic violence — and the existential weirdness behind it — they might deliver exactly what King’s been asking for.

Would you want the Warhammer show to get truly nasty, or should they rein it in?