Astartes 2 was not on my New Year bingo card but here we are.
If, like me, you've been despairing that a follow-up to the critically praised and containment-breaking Astartes series of short films was never going to happen because it was not in alignment with Games Workshop's promotional strategy for Warhammer 40,000, I guess this should come as a relief. After all, a great deal of footage in this teaser is either taken directly from or expands on footage previously seen only on Syama Pedersen's Patreon.
But with a projected release of 2026 and such a heavy reliance on five-year-old animation, I can't help but wonder what the holdup has been. Astartes has arguably done more to promote the Warhammer brand than anything Games Workshop has produced in the last decade - its reuploads are million+ view videos on YouTube and its arguable that its success contributed to reviving the Space Marine video game brand after a decade of dormancy.
I wonder if the success of Secret Level - to which Pedersen contributed and whose Warhammer episode clearly owes a great deal of inspiration to the original Astartes - may not have shaken something loose. We've seen brand-aligned Warhammer+ content like Pariah Nexus and the Tithe fail to meaningfully move the needle of popular consciousness.
And at least part of that has been paywalling the content so that only the most ardent enthusiasts will ever see it. My drafts are full of unpublished think pieces on the whys and wherefores of Warhammer+, so I won't pretend to have been ahead of the curve on this one, but I don't think that any of it is worth seven bucks a month. Warhammer isn't G.I. Joe or Transformers, but I think the idea of an animated series to drive interest in and sales to the merchandise is an evergreen business model when properly executed.
Nor is it clear to me that releasing the teaser on YouTube is going to drive subscriptions to Warhammer+. The streaming model hasn't exactly been doing gangbusters the past few years and if you're not interested in the Warhammer+ subscriber exclusive miniature then there's really no reason to subscribe to such a niche service for one show.
Then again, I didn't anticipate Astartes 2 ever happening so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Time will tell.
