Its audience won’t leave the house & have no money.
Wait, I’ll ask the WoW-head.
Me: “Do you think it would be cool if they made a WoW movie?”
WoW-Zombie: (unenthusiastically) “Maaybe.”
You do know that’s pretty insulting right? I have plenty of money, leave the house, and love playing WoW. Considering the size of their user base I’d say the vast majority is like me and not like whoever you are talking about.
That said, while the lore works in the game, I’m 95% sure I have no interest in seeing a movie about it. I’d rather watch LotR again.
If you play the game, you know that with each expansion and major patch, Blizz puts out some impressive cinematics that further develop the story arcs. I like to think Blizz would not create a movie that spoiled future game events-- why steal your own thunder? All the things I can think of that would make interesting movie plots are rumored to be touched upon in future expansions-- The Emerald Dream, Queen Azshara and the Naga, the South Seas, the Great Sea stuff, Titans, etc. That just leaves past events, which wouldn’t really be relevant to anything.
Besides, with 10 million+ subscribers shelling out $15/mo., $50 million in potential box office profit wouldn’t be that big of a deal. If Blizz is going to devote time, money, and people to developing the story of these things anyway, it’s makes more sense for it to be devoted to the game rather than a movie.
Which is why Blizzard would probably not be involved in the production of the movie.
The rumor I heard is that it’s sort of an AU thing (Orcs and Goblins vs 2nd-War-esque Alliance of Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes, and Men, no pesky Night Elves or Tauren etc in the way). Maybe that’s changed.
Also, if every person who played WoW went to see this movie, it would earn the same for Blizzard as one month of them playing WoW right?
Pretty much (although based on movie prices in my area they would each have to take a non-playing friend).
That’s a damn good point.
My god, when you can think of movie revenue as chump change…
It’s coming! Sam Raimie, nice choice. I’m going. Just fyi I don’t play any more, I played for 3 or 4 years, still feel nostalgic for the world. I may love or hate the movie, won’t know til I go, but I’m definitely curious to see what they come up with.
http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/090721.html
brief excerpt from above link:
“Blizzard Entertainment and Legendary Pictures have a shared vision for this film and we searched at length to find the very best director to bring that vision to life,” said Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. “From our first conversation with Sam, we could tell he was the perfect choice. Sam knows how to simultaneously satisfy the enthusiasts and the mainstream audience that might be experiencing that content for the first time. We’re looking forward to working with him to achieve that here.”
… I don’t mean to cast a shadow over the WoW flick. I hope it does happen, and I hope they choose the best story line, but allow me to do the devil’s advocate thing for a moment, just for shits 'n giggles?
A lot of games are being and have been made into films, although I have to admit, I have never seen even one of them - just read about them, i.e., Laura Crofts, Prince of Persia (yet to be released, I think?), and what else - The Mario Bros?
Add to the mix all of the comic book heroes movies such as Batman, Iron Man, and the yet to come Green Lantern (and I love watching those, because I read those books as a kid!;)), and do you see where I’m going with this?
The film industry is releasing so many of these things, that there’s bound to be a turd or two in the bunch, and I just hope like HELL the stink doesn’t attach itself to my beloved WoW, and cause reviewers to write garbage because of the number of those types of movies they’ve seen and didn’t like!
I’ll be standing in line to see the WoW flick for sure. (Maybe I can finally see what “tanking’s” all about :D:D:D)
I just want very much for that film to be the gem it deserves to be: right up there with The Lord of The Rings Trilogy.
KK. I’m done! 
Thanks
Q
Don’t forget about Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter (along with a more recent Chun Li centric version), House of the Dead, Resident Evil (3 of them, with a 4th on its way), Silent Hill, and Doom.
What’s ironic is that most, if not all, of the video game based movies are pretty much crap. Compare that to the recent comic book based movies, and those are actually pretty watchable, and some are even pretty damn good. X-Men, Iron Man, Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight come to mind.
I think the problem lies in the fact that video games don’t have the volumes and volumes of storyline that comic books have. It’s a lot easier to write a captivating and compelling story when you already have something solid to base it off of.
The thing is, Video Game Movies haven’t had a big blockbuster yet, but there have been plenty of “passable” ones. Mortal Kombat (the first one) was on the lower end of passable, Tomb Raider is probably the best example of one that’s well above watchable, but certainly not great*.
Oddly enough, the other way around seems to fair differently, there’s plenty of absolute crap movie games, but the adaptations seem to be rather polar, they’re either nigh unplayable or complete legends (Goldeneye for example), there are only a few ones I can think to describe as “mediocre”, off hand LOTR** based games seem to be the only ones I can recall.
You’re right that they don’t have the storyline in comparison to comics, but that’s changing. I think the easiest one to do would either be something like Metal Gear Solid which has throughout the series what, like 100+ hours of cutscenes total? Or something that is simply a formula like Zelda, no consistent continuity that you can “ruin” by not including a certain scene, but rather a set of tropes and universal truths they can craft a new story around easily without worrying about omitting the wrong thing from Ocarina of Time.
Either way, new games are starting to get a bit excited with background material, what with in-game pickups that describe the backstory, pre-release websites with volumes of information, and even Expanded Universe novels in extreme cases (like Halo, Mass Effect, or, hey, Warcraft which has so many background Novels and comics it’s getting ridiculous).
- Only exceptions are the ones that made it into Anime movie form, which have had some pretty good ones, from what I understand (though I can’t recall any off hand in the feature length movie sphere).
** The ones based explicitly on the Jackson movie, I mean, I’m sure there have been some text adventures or something here and there based off the book that were pretty good.
A few reasons I can think of:
A) Some games really don’t have a story. For all the Super Mario games out there, there’s not a big story behind them. Bowser kidnaps the Princess, Mario rescues the Princess. To get a 1-2 hour story, you need to add a lot of stuff. In the case of the movie, they added a lot of cow shit.
B) The games that do have a story tend to be very self-contained. Comics have a pretty stable cast of characters that frequently encounter each other without anything permanent happening, and few people ever stay dead. With games, however, the setting and main character is introduced at the start, then it carries on to a very definitive end. There’s nowhere else to really go after that.
C) The games that do have a story and tell it well…don’t need a movie. You’ve already got the story experience in the game.
D) Uwe Boll targets game franchises, not comic franchises.
E) Comics have been around longer than games. The people working on movies and the target moviegoing audience all grew up with comics. They know and enjoy them, so more effort is being put into them. Video games in the past 15 years or so were seen as a kid’s toy, so movies were sort of aimed at kids and done halfassedly. We’re now getting into the era where adults grew up with video games, so they’re going to be given more weight as legitimate movie sources.
Warcraft manages to avoid all those problems. There’s a setting, a cast of characters, and a framework of existing stories to work with, much like a comic book series. There are a lot of existing stories that could benefit from a screen treatment, as well as a lot of unaccounted for time that could hold a brand new story. Uwe Boll was laughed out of Blizzard’s offices. Finally, as the OP says, there’s a massive built-in audience. The studio would be stupid not to give Warcraft its due as a proper cash cow.
The problem with video games is that they have no character development. They only have a plot, the gamer controls all the actions in between plot points.
So we know how Mario saves the princess, but we don’t know why. We don’t know who Mario is. We don’t know his fears, desires, or anything else. The movie had to create it’s own Mario, and it had to use a pretty ridiculous plot.
I never played WOW, but my guess is that we don’t know its characters either. We know what they do, but we have no clue why they’re doing the ridiculous things we see them doing in the video game. Any script written about WOW would have to fill that in from scratch. This being a Hollywood production, I wouldn’t hold my breath about what they come up with.
That’s not true, we know tons about Thrall, for instance. From the fact that he was interned in a camp under humans for most of his early life (and a lot of what he was feeling and who his friends were during this time) to his desires to find his ancestors (recently happened in game) to his desire to stop the stupid perpetual Horde/Alliance war and get them to actually work together like they did against the first (well… second) full scale Burning Legion invasion.
What you’re saying is true for very basic games, usually ones that are holdovers from old days (like Mario) or Western RPGs/games with karma systems which rely on the player choosing what to do, that last one even trips game developers up because when they make sequels they often end up having to choose a “canon” ending when in the game itself there could have been a good one, evil one, neutral one, lawful one (etc etc).
Your typical JRPG tends to have boatloads of background information with exposition upon exposition about the character’s motivations for just about everything.
Yeah, that’s why I have high hopes for this. The key characters are already very well realized, so you don’t have some hack writer making stuff up out of whole cloth. Blizzard won’t let an uninteresting script pass, and Raimi should be able to make even a mediocre script fun to watch.
I hope that at the very least they have Metzen give his blessing on the script before they finalize it, that would ensure a lot (granted the man DOES have a track record for forgetting places and plot points exist, like Gilneas, but whatever, it would still be better than not doing it).
Edit: For just a quick browse of how expansive the story is here’s two things from WoW insider, Ask a Lore Nerd and Know your Lore (the links go to the last pages, it’s blog style so go to the previous page to get to the more recent entries)-
http://www.wow.com/category/know-your-lore/page/5/
http://www.wow.com/category/ask-a-lore-nerd/page/4/