In May 2006, Legendary Pictures announced that they had acquired the rights from Blizzard Entertainment to make a World of Warcraft movie. There was the sound of enormous rejoicing from gamers around the world and then … a great silence. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in joy and were suddenly silenced. Since then, the silence from Legendary and Blizzard has been fairly deafening. Two years later and still no news on the project. Apparently it’s still in development but they haven’t hired the “someone along the lines of a Zack Snyder, Christopher Nolan type” they wanted to direct the project.
With a planned release date of 2009 impossible to meet at this point, why not just scrap the whole thing? They could save themselves the embarrassment of spending over $100 million dollars on a movie that’ll end up tanking at the box office and become a pack-in freebie with the next expansion set. There’s a growing mountain of reasons not to make this movie; take a look at them after the break.
First and foremost, it’s only been eight years since Dungeons & Dragons came out, and gamers are still feeling the sting. This was a big budget (relatively — $45 million dollars wasn’t that small in 2000) movie based on another extremely popular role playing game. However, it tanked at the box office and is generally loathed by both fans of the game and moviegoers alike. Over the top acting from Jeremy Irons, deadpan lines from Thora Birch, and a ridiculous storyline that didn’t pay attention to the years of manuals and expansions didn’t help.
They followed that up with a direct to TV sequel in 2005 that tried to right all the wrongs: it included specific items from the games, made reference to many of the expansion sets, and had characters who followed the “rules” of the game. Plans were that it would lead into a series on the Sci Fi Channel, but that possibility faded into forgotten realms. The blurb for the series, which was to appear in 2009, has since been removed from the Sci Fi Channel website.
Second reason, as they say on NPR’s Marketplace… “Let’s do the numbers.” At last check, Blizzard had more than 10 million subscribers for WoW. That means if every one of those people bought a $10 ticket, they’d make $100 million dollars on the movie, which is what they’ve said the budget is. However, with prints and advertising often doubling the cost of a movie, that means it woulndn’t even have made a dent in making its money back. Plus, many of those subscribers are no doubt duplicate accounts from the same person, as evidenced by one guy who plays 36 characters at the same time. So if you account for those, and people who tend to not go to the movies, you’re already cutting your installed fanbase down significantly.
Third, it’s not The Lord of the Rings, which many people compare the Warcraft storyline to. The problem is that people had been reading the Lord of the Rings for years before that movie came out, so it had a large base to begin with. Even if you hadn’t read it, you were somewhat familiar with the legend of Bilbo and Frodo, either by hearing about it from friends, or seeing the Ralph Bakshi cartoons that were popular in the late 70s.
With Warcraft, you’d be hard pressed to get the storyline out of many gamers. Plenty of people jump in, skip past the cutscenes, and just want to start playing the game. The original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was a real time strategy games, pitting orcs against humans. You had to harvest lumber, mine gold, and build different units in an effort to both protect yourself from the enemy, and to eventually try and overrun them. Eventually a storyline and a plot were fleshed out through the four sequels that followed, and expanded even more in the World of Warcraft RPG game.
But can the average gamer tell you the plot? I played WoW for nearly nine months, and all I know is that I was a Warlock trying to level up. You had to complete hundreds of mundane quests like “Find this rare ale for me, so I can make my daughter’s wedding perfect!” in order to gain experience, while fighting off different creatures along the way. That’s somewhat of an oversimplification, but I just wasn’t aware of a single overreaching storyline. Don’t get me wrong, the game was still fun, but that was because of the gameplay mechanics and the rich world they’d created… not an ongoing story.
A good example of this is Metal Gear Solid 4. Easily one of the highest anticipated games ever released for Sony’s flagship PlayStation 3, it featured over 90 minutes of cutscenes. That’s enough to cobble their own movie together. Some of these were presented to the gamer in extremely long chunks, which led many people to just thumb a button and skip past them. In an battle of short attention spans, the it’s just too easy to press the shiny button to get back into the game. As a result, a lot of people played through MGS4, but weren’t too sure what had just happened.
Finally, it’s been over two years since the announcement was made, yet they don’t have anything to show for it except one piece of concept art. No script, no storyline, no director, no attached talent… nothing. The game has powered ahead full steam with the Burning Crusade expansion in January of 2007, and the new Wrath of the Lich King pack coming out on November 13th. So where’s the info on the movie? For all of the gung-ho attitude about it with a 2009 release date, it seemed to vanish overnight. Even at this year’s BlizzCon there was no movie news, except that they’re “working on it.”
It would be best if Blizzard shuttered these plans altogether, and instead released a series of DVDs or movies available to download that feature the same amount of animation that goes into the opening cinematics and trailers for many of their games. They look a lot better than they could ever hope the live-action movie would. Save us all and channel that money elsewhere, both gamers and movie lovers will thank you for it.
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog