There is a Warcraft Movie Blog, and it has some psuedo-news gathered through what I assume was some form of scrying or dark ritual performed at Blizzcon.
Today at BlizzCon 2007 we have heard our first solid and interesting information with regards to the Warcraft, or to some, the World of Warcraft Movie. This movie will be big, huge, EPIC even – in fact, Thomas Tull (producer of 300) stated a budget of over $100m would be committed, with a projected 2009 release date. Legendary Pictures are 100% committed to this project, it shall be a “tent-pole”, something to stand next to and say “we did that!” – whilst remaining true to the game and fan base.
The plot for the film will take place approximately a year before the start of World of Warcraft, including races you have played and lands you have wandered in, where lots of plot arcs are melded into a two and a half hour story. The film itself will revolve around a ‘badass’ new hero, with a theme towards conflict and culture – being a War Movie rather than a quest movie, from an Alliance’s perspective.
Take all of that as you will, I’m really sitting back and not judging or even thinking about this yet. The one problem I might has is with the WCMovieBlog’s quoting who I am assuming is Tull as saying:
“While my heart lies with the Horde and Thrall’s an interesting character, from a movie making standpoint, a blockbuster movie its a little rough to try and tell it from the perspective of this green looking dude.”
I honestly haven’t thought in depth about this yet, but I feel it is dead wrong. Creating a movie about the Alliance and its fight against the Horde sounds like a straight LotR movie rip to me, but a movie focusing on the Thrall side of things not only gives you a great antagonist for the whole movie, but there’s Grom Hellscream as a fantastic companion character, PLUS the entire Orcs interaction with the Mannaroth and the Demons plotline would make the movie stand out above the rest. You can read a Q&A and see a video as well as the full image of the first piece of concept art (Teldrassil at right) at the WCMovieBlog here.
In other movie news it looks like Jami from AngryZenMaster has the only working footage from Ironman that I could find, though I admit I haven’t had a ton of time to be looking all over the place for it. I haven’t gotten the chance to watch it all with sound yet either, so let me know what you think about it!
Also, I wanted to post a great image from Bethsoft’s Fallout page of the development team behind the game, this just made me crack up:
in my opinion the story of warcraft was always two sided. You empathise with the orc, while fearing for the human. It wasnt until WC3 that the orc “plight” was really felt as human, and the humans were seen as selfish and self righteous to the end.
I really think the movie should focus on both aspects with main characters from both races.
No matter what way you slice it people will just look at it as a LOTR ripoff anyway,except the long time fans of the game. I just hope they dont fuck it up to badly.
as for the ironman trailer… please dont make him be fighting terrorists in iran for god sakes…
Yeah, I agree with you that would be both more faithful to the source material and a more interesting movie, but neither major studios nor Blizzard are interested in doing anything else than what’s been done before.
The main villain in Iron Man is supposed to be The Mandarin, a decidedly Oriental stereotype. But that doesn’t rule out Iranian lackeys…
Since this has franchise written all over it maybe the second film will be more orcish… I mean thats how the franchise worked, so why not the movies?
Don’t forget that Blizzard pretty much created an entire game detailing the adventures of Thrall as he rose to power. From slave to warlord kinda thing. They may possibly use the story that they have already written.
Are the developers walking into the loading dock at their building? Cause that would be a perfect geographic location for their “vault” in the game. Seriously, setting the game in DC is really what got me excited about it.
Yea that’s the loading area, but the way it’s shot it really looks awesome. Though the game is in DC, I asked Emil after the press event if they’d be putting their building / street in the game and he hinted that it was not beyond possibility (apparently the guy from Kotaku overheard that too). So I doubt that vault 101 is geographically the same place, but that would be pretty funny.