Maybe when Jesus' second coming happens.
Maybe when Jesus' second coming happens.
They always told me I would miss my family... but I never miss from close range.
Why not? Arthas' story is in Lordaeron and Northrend. Medivh tells Terenas of the Legion invasion of Kalimdor but that can be left for a sequel.
The Legion are of course behind the scourge invasion, but don't actually have all that much involvement.
I'd propose going from his childhood, as the novel did.
You'd have the first act showing us who he is, the second telling the story in Lordaeron, and Northrend, and then a 3rd act with his return. Introduce a climactic battle around Lordaeron, perhaps moving Uther's death to this point, and then the film closes on the death of Terenas.
Perhaps a mid credits scene moves Medivh and Jaina's encounter in Stratholme to this point. She reflects on how this is the point where he was lost, and then Medivh warns her of a greater threat emerging in Kalimdor, and how this was all a distraction sent by the Burning Legion.
As for the answer to the 2nd questions, basically, no it didn't do well enough.
Here is the actual math that shows how much the studio gets out of it:
1) About 1/2 of the domestic box office receipts. So the studio got about $23.7 million.
2) About 1/3 of the international box office receipts*. So the studio got, at most, about $128.8 million.
The studio, on the other hand, spent a reported $160 million on their production budget. I don't recall a ton of advertising, so let's be generous and assume they only spent about $20 million on advertising.
So, they got about $152.5 million in box office receipts from a spend of about $180 million. Now, due to licensing deals (showing on TV, blu-ray sales, etc), they will likely get another $24 million domestically and a few million internationally over the next decade or so. Basically, it will be a wash for them after an entire decade post-release.
Unless there are other factors (e.g. toy sales, Blizzard giving them a portion of subscription receipts as a result of the movie, etc), that is not nearly sufficient enough to justify doing a 2nd movie.
* - Warcraft did really well in one country in particular - China. Generally, movie studios only get about 1/4 of the box office receipts from that country, so they likely got closer to about $100 million internationally in reality.
A movie around Arthas sounds like the ideal way of beginning the Warcraft movie series. I don't believe that a new serie has to begin at the very beginning, but rather start at the good stuff thats also the most appealing to new viewers. Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are probably 2 of the most famous movie series and they didn't start at the very beginning either.
The warcraft movie wasn't a solid enough to see a second one anytime soon.
It lost money. Didn't resonate well enough all Warcraft fans to see it more than once combined with it didn't resonate with the general audience of movie watchers at all.
China being how they are and quite fanatic about warcraft (the built an illegal Warcraft theme park) was the saving grace for the movie. Otherwise it would have been an abysmal failure instead of just a flop. A second movie in the largest majority of cases does worse than the first. Hard hurdle to get over for warcraft.
So a second warcraft would have to be done on a much lower budget and thats a recipe for failure when you take into account how bad all the visuals were except the orcs. Jones blew his wad on orcs to the detriment of the rest of the movie. A lower budget movie would have little to no chance at success in the movie world with shitty looking orcs and the rest looking terrible as well.
I don't see a second movie happening at all to be honest but you might see a reboot of sorts years down the road when this one is forgotten about. I don't see a movie studio jumping on a second Warcraft anytime soon except maybe The wanda group that bought up legendary but then it would be a movie based on a China release and not mainstream.
Slim to none chance there is a second warcraft movie anytime soon.
According to Box Office Mojo (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=warcraft.htm) :
Earnings:
Domestic: $47,365,290 10.9%
Foreign: $386,311,893 89.1%
Total: $433,677,183
Budget: $160,000,000
That's raw earning of 273 million and change
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I dunno, I like their writing lately. WoD as a whole was awful, but it had a few very good highlights, mainly Khadgar and Gul'dan. They were two very cool characters from the past that they brought back and made relevant again, in a very good way in my opinion. Now they're doing the same for Illidan, Turalyon, and Alleria. I realize many people might not like how Illidan is taking the spotlight, but I think his appearances throughout this expansion have been badass as hell.
Doesnt production budget include most of these? (specially the production costs lol)
At least from what I know, when people try to determine a success or a flop, they focus in pretty much all instances on budget and marketing, just these two. Now don't get me wrong, I agree it was a disaster financial wise, definitely not what the studio wanted, but it seems a bit off excluding production elements in the production budget.
The movie was a massive failure and most of the China revenue was actually from the distributor pumping their own money into buying their own tickets - they were more concerned with saving face with important Chinese marketing partners for future projects so they ate the costs to meet certain marketing financial goals. This is why there is zero appetite to do another movie. Also I feel Blizzard feels like the whole thing was a failure in their eyes, they made nothing from the movie, so why should they risk another failure. It was mostly Metzen's baby to move into other media (since the company was no longer interested in him). Blizzard has moved on from telling stories and is only interested in being an e-sports league and producing multiplayer only games.
Except studios get like half of their domestic earnings, 1/3 of foreign and China is usually granting only quarter, so your math is a bit off. Now we can't say exactly how much of a flop the movie was (specially since we dont know how much money they spend on marketing, that's also in tens of millions), but it certainly wasn't a money maker. At best in the most generous cases, it made even (and that's assuming the studio had some financial deals with blizzard, since it was basically a huge advertisment for their game). From whatever angle you wanna look at it, it's not good. But even these kinds of disasters sometimes get sequals (that on average bomb even worse), however that's in the case of positively accepted movies, Warcraft failed pretty spectaculary critics-wise, so Blizzard would have to make a huge push (financial) for sequal to happen. And given their recent Activision policies, doubt that's gonna happen.
In financial terms the Warcraft movie is very much comparable to the performance of Pacific Rim, and that one is getting a sequel, so in no way is it a foregone conclusion that they will not make a sequel to Warcraft, nor that they will. We'll have to wait and see.
They failed to make brake-even at the box office, but they weren't that far off, probobly they will have hit break-even by now thanks to DVD/Blu-ray/streaming/distribution rights sales. Even then, this movie may very well be viewed as a massive ad campaign for Blizzard's core business, video games. Usually they spend money on ads without any prospect of earning that money back on the ads themselves. So if they can make more massive ads like this one and break-even, or even close to it, that may very well be enough for them to make another one. Probably whatever deal they had with production and distribution companies will have to change, though.
Probably the right question is whether this Warcraft movie will get a sequel or whether enough time will pass that they opt for a reboot instead of a sequel. Pretty sure at some point there'll be another Warcraft movie.
Legendary Studios is a subsidiary of a Chinese conglomerate. Also, the domestic U.S. market is increasingly less important for whether or not movies get made. It's a big wide world and money is money.
The movie didn't do well enough to guarantee a sequel but didn't do badly enough to make a sequel a terrible idea either. Basically the movie didn't live up to expectations which were unrealistic to start with.
Just being fair and realistic here. I think if a sequel was really in the works we'd know something about it. We don't. But that doesn't mean that there aren't scripts out there in turnaround and someone thinking it over.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
Unless Blizzard is willing to allow the film to be made in China, I think the Warcraft 2 will probably not get made.
Also I believe the Warcraft movie did not make a profit is mainly due to the practice known as 'hollywood accounting' (you can google it to find out more about it).
Due to this practice, you can have situations where The Lord of the Rings trilogy was supposedly to have been horrible losses, the second highest-grossing Harry Potter film made a 100+ million loss on paper, and the Spiderman movie which made 800+ Million in revenue had no net profit so the studio do not need to pay Stan Lee royalties.
I would really like to see the lich king plot in a movie or two but I seriously doubt it will happen because the reception was mediocre :/
I want to see the Lich King storyline at some point, so I sure hope so.