BlizzCon is on and Blizzard is throwing at us what they’ve got about the upcoming World of Warcraft movie. While WarCraft III became one of the most popular RTS games ever, WoW was the game that brought MMORPG to the mainstream audience and Blizzard doesn’t want to stop milking it. The movie is being handled by Legendary Pictures, truly legendary for movies like Batman Begins and 300.
No director has been attached to the project yet, but it will certainly be someone of ‘caliber’. Man, I can’t wait for Uwe Boll to hear this. Blizzard and Legendary are intent on “not creating another video game movie”, but an actual “epic movie”. They further commented that they aren’t making this movie for the 9 million WoW fans alone, but for the general audience. When describing the $100 million movie, Legendary Pictures’ Thomas Tull said, “We’re not gonna make some cheesy little.. I don’t even know what a good example is,” when the crowd began crying “Doom!” Tull answered that he’s not giving any examples.
The storyline will not be buried in thousands of years of continuity, but will be more “recent”. The main character is touted to be “bad ass”, and the setting will be some time before World of Warcraft, so that fans can see the races, the places and cleavage spaces from the game. The movie is described as a series of plot points rolled up together in a 2.5 hour long movie, like X-Men. While Legendary saying it sounds good, I’m not entirely so sure myself.
The movie will not be a “quest movie” like Lord of the Rings, but a full-fledged war movie. Well, with War in its title already, I didn’t know what else to expect. It will be set from the perspective of the Alliance, which set all the Horde-fans into “hate mode”. Chris Metzen from Blizzard confirmed that he loves the Horde and that Thrall is an “interesting character”. After saying that a green-skinned guy doesn’t make for a Hollywood protagonist, a fan yelled “Shrek!” The fan, who went missing is rumoured to have been a Pixar employee wanting to create a G-rated film and rake in the moolah.
Metzen says that they want to include the intensity and not compromise on the action in the movie. It will definitely not be a G or a PG-rated movie, thank God. R is extremely unlikely, hinting that the movie will most likely fall in the PG-13 group. According to an answer to a question posed by a fan, Chuck Norris has not been contacted for a cameo (as of now). We can only keep hoping, though.
The movie is slated for a 2009 release and is too early in production to talk more about. No big stars have been confirmed yet, but not denied either. As a parting gift, Blizzard gave us some concept art for the game, which you’ll see at the top (yeah, it’s just that). Click on it to see a super-sized version.
This is shaping up to be more of a kick-ass movie than it was originally thought of. We’ll see how it shapes up in the end in 2009, though.
