Sam Raimi To Direct World of Warcraft Movie 298
Decado writes "Blizzard has just announced that Sam Raimi is to direct the new World of Warcraft movie. 'Raimi, acclaimed director of the blockbuster Spider-Man series, will bring the forces of the Horde and the Alliance to life in epic live-action film. Charles Roven's Atlas Entertainment will produce alongside Raimi's Stars Road Entertaiment.' While it's still early in the process, does this offer hope that someone might finally make a good movie based on a game IP?"
... Film from a game... (Score:2, Insightful)
... this film gonna be bad... like so many other film based on a game... I can't even name one good film based from a game.
Maybe it's just a feeling...
Try as I might (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't this movie... (Score:1, Insightful)
Not only that, they'd have to leave their parent's basement.
I think the DVD and Blu-Ray sales are going to be through the roof!
Re:... Film from a game... (Score:5, Insightful)
Clue!
Well, at least it had Tim Curry, Madeline Khan and Christopher Llyod in it... how bad could it be?
So bad it's good!
Makes sense (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:... Film from a game... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't even name one good film based from a game.
Resident Evil was pretty good and it actually one of the few video game movies that actually didn't just make random shit up for its own plot.
Beyond that I'm hard pressed to think of any movies based on games that were any good... There was the first Mortal Kombat movie, but it was about as good as a Van Dam movie.
A film first (Score:1, Insightful)
It'll be told almost entirely in flashbacks to reproduce the grind experience to cater to the hardcore fans. There are plans to do a 10 minute edited version for the non fans
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
However the budget-challenged, direct-to-video sequel to the D&D movie, although not a masterpiece of storytelling, actually managed to capture the feel and pace of playing an old-fashioned late-1st edition D&D game of high level (9th-10th level) characters. If they've continued churning out a series of films in that style, I would have happily bought them up.
Re:Dear Hollywood: DO SOMETHING ORIGINAL! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:... Film from a game... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been playing WoW for 3-4 years now, and I'm curious as to what unique experiences you're looking for. Getting ganked during the Stranglethorn fishing contest? Spending 40 hours fishing pools in Northrend trying to get the sea turtle mount? Watching some bot-based toon running in circles for some Chinese gold farmer? Spending 30 minutes challenging the door boss to get in to an instance?
While there aren't ends for the players, there are story lines that run through the game. Theoretically, they could easily pick something from the Lich King, the whole Scourge vs. everybody fight thing, but I suspect that pessimism here is warranted. I don't enjoy the game itself, per se. I like having something to do while chatting with guildies. That, and the achievement system integrates nicely with my OCD.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:... Film from a game... (Score:3, Insightful)
"I can't even name one good film based from a game."
Advent Children was really good.
If you're not watching from the PoV of an FF7 fan, then no, it really wasn't. It was pretty.
Re:... Film from a game... (Score:3, Insightful)
Keep in mind, the Warcraft universe has a highly developed lore - while the story isn't always a major focus in WoW, it's there, it's been explored in novels, comics and other media - I'd expect the movie to be more like this, a telling of the underlying Warcraft story, than an attempt to translate the game into cinema.
Re:This is not going to go well... (Score:3, Insightful)
There is major error in the article title, summary, and even very nearly every article out there on the net. To demonstrate, let's go to the actual source of the information, the Blizzard press release [blizzard.com].
The error is this: the movie is not a World of Warcraft movie. The movie is a Warcraft movie. It's a movie set in the Warcraft universe, not one based on the World of Warcraft game. You're right, out of necessity WoW is fairly static - that's how it is that you have content that's consumed again and again by various and even the same players. However the Warcraft universe is not static.
Especially if you play through the Warcraft III original and expansion games, you'll discover that Blizzard actually has a real talent for telling a story. They even go so far as to kill or dramatically change major characters. Watch the progression of Arthas from human paladin to undead lieutenant to rogue undead eventually to becoming the Lich King. See how they killed Grom Helscream in an epic battle, or how they killed Sylvanas Windrunner and brought her back as Lady Sylvanas, queen of the rogue undead.
Blizzard has an extremely rich lore in the Warcraft universe, and this is fertile ground for a movie or even a series of movies. They've already demonstrated their cinematic prowess and story writing abilities in the in-game and pre-rendered cutscenes in Warcraft III and Diablo II. There's no particular reason to think they would do worse than that with a bigger budget associated with a movie.
A movie based on World of Warcraft would be crap. A movie based on Warcraft though, that has real promise.
Re:If you make a movie (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't normally be terribly interested in a WoW movie, but if Sam Raimi does it, well, perhaps. It's certainly millions of times better than Uwe Boll or Michael Bay. Raimi knows how to make movies fun.
Re:... Film from a game... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they can pull it off with WoW, because while the *game* moves on, various subplots don't. They could totally make a movie about Onyxia or C'thun getting pwnzored, because they can choose from any subplot they darn well please. They could even do the origin of Deathwing and the creation of the demon soul, events which have never taken place in WoW the game but are an important part of the lore.
The thing with DnD is not just that it, as a game, has no definite ending. It just doesn't have the same lore structure to back it up. DnD (from an outsider's perspective, at least) lacks NPCs with names who run around doing important stuff. WoW doesn't lack any of that because of its RTS storylines, which since day 1 have guided the path of stories that WoW has told.
Onyxia was killed, C'thun lies dead, Kiljaden was defeated, and now the Lich King has the Alliance and Horde knocking on his front door crying for blood. Stories in WoW end, even if the game itself doesn't.
Re:... Film from a game... (Score:1, Insightful)
It wasn't even that pretty, computer graphics like that stopped being impressive about a decade ago. It was brown. Why the fuck did they make it brown?
Not to mention that the movie itself was like the Final Fantasy equivalent of a Brady Bunch reunion special.
Re:... Film from a game... (Score:1, Insightful)
No, final fantasy was terrible because it was made by the people who made the game, and they thought: look, we film or create 30x the length of a feature length film in full motion video assets for our game, so we should be able to make a film with like 1/30th the effort. 1/10th at the most.
They tried to make a short game composed entirely of cutscenes, rather than making a real movie. The difference is palpable.
Re:Wouldn't this movie... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, any wow player can take a few hours out of their tuesday morning to watch the movie, as long as it doesn't extend past 11am pst, there's no problem.
Re:... Film from a game... (Score:1, Insightful)
Advent Children wasn't close to photo-realism at all. It was a dull gray and brown fest with deformed anime characters - despite popular belief in the video game industry, real isn't brown. There aren't many feature-length CGI films that have really strived for photo-realism, but I've seen countless video game cinematics that have come closer to photo-realism, and big budget films which inter-mix between live action and computer graphics are almost invariably more impressive. This kind of thing had the "wow" factor to it back in the late 90's when people were just starting to get it right, but nobody cares anymore.
I haven't seen the extended version, but my problem with Advent Children's plot wasn't that it wasn't fleshed out enough, just that it was mind-numbingly stupid. And I still maintain that Final Fantasy 7 needs a sequel like Rush Limbaugh needs cake.