What went wrong with Warcraft?

[Crispin]

No it’s more like here is a great idea like WOW, what if we just took a giant shit on it put it in a can for 5 Years and maybe nobody will know. Once they see it.

It’s like if you could kill someone for coming up with this kind of train wreck a movie could be, this “film” and I use that term loosely would qualify.

It's a game going to the movies, I've yet to see any of them be good, Warcraft was decent. I never expected it to be anywhere near as good as Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings.

Set the bar low and you wont be dissapointed, books becoming movies have the same issue, they're extremely rarely anywhere near as good as the book.

[Airlick]

Nothing went wrong. You expected a small low budget movie with a bunch of unknowns based on a game to be as good as a HUGE budget mega production with an all star cast based on one of the most loved books of all times. It is a bit like buying a hotdog and be disappointing that it isn't a rib-eye steak.

It didn't have a low budget. It was some 70% of what, say, Marvel movies get. Not ideal, but far from low. LotR also didn't have an “all-star cast". Only a few actors had any recognition at the time FotR was released. Just out of the main cast, the only ones remotely recognizable were Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom, and the only actually popular actor was Ian McKellen. Most of the popular actors in the movie had background roles, like Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett and Christopher Lee. Honestly, you probably can't remember any of the hobbits’ actors names, other than Elijah Wood, and they had half of the screen time across the movies.

Though it has to be said that basically the only known actor from Warcraft was Travis Fimmel, and he butchered Lothar's character that was already butchered by the writers in the first place, so I guess LotR stomps Warcraft in this regard. But then LotR had a big name behind it, everyone and their dogs have heard of the universe even if they haven't read the books before the movies, which can't be said of Warcraft.

[Sanguinerd]

The movie is pretty average but a great deal (for me) comes down to the actors doing a poor job. The CGI characters like many have said were just awesome.

Garona, Lothar, Llane and Medivh really ruined this movie for me - terrible actors and characters.

They changed so many unnecessary things for whatever stupid reason and when it all adds up it just becomes shit!

[fakaroonie]

Is it confirmed that we are not getting a second movie? I assume so since at Blizzcon there was no mention of it, and I think that if you're going to announce another movie, you're doing it there.

Shame really, they could have done it differently with the second for sure. They knew they had one chance and maybe that was too much pressure.

[bmjclark]

Cut Lothars son out of the movie
Cut the light and darkness weird shit
Stormwind burns at the end

There, movie is at least 15% better. (Scientific numbers)

Also, they honestly probably should have just done the 2nd war, or the 3rd war and just skipped the first.

[Soulwind]

Cut Lothars son out of the movie
Cut the light and darkness weird shit
Stormwind burns at the end

There, movie is at least 15% better. (Scientific numbers)

Also, they honestly probably should have just done the 2nd war, or the 3rd war and just skipped the first.

Lothar's son, if done correctly, could have given shape to his loyalty, and his loss could have been key in him becoming a fearless (maybe reckless) warrior that would inspire the *smirk* Sons of Lothar. The kid wasn't great, and his death didn't seem to affect Lothar that much.

The Light and Darkness weird shit, if done correctly, could have been foreshadowing for paladins in the Second War. I don't know what Aegwynn (Alodi, sure) or Khadgar had to do with that, though.

I agree Stormwind should have burned to create a bit of expectation for a sequel. Right now the movie just ends after a battle in which neither side loses enough for the war to be over.

While I would have loved to see the trolls and other hints at the world around the First War, I think they already put too many things into what was going to be a first movie that anyone could understand. Dwarves, elves, murlocs, two or three different types of magic, all while trying to show both sides of the conflict, something not even war movies dare to do because of how limited screentime is.

- The writers/director should have known how much was too much. There's world building and there's information overload, the first half of this movie is the latter. It's commendable that they tried to make a gray fantasy film in which neither side was truly good or bad, but they should have made sure the studio would provide everything the concept required (a confirmed trilogy, for one).

- The studio shouldn't have cut half of the film in editting. The idea that "gamers" are hyperactive children who won't pay attention to anything that isn't short, loud and violent is in the head of some very old guy with a very expensive suit who, unfortunately, had quite a lot of power over this project.

- The advertisement shouldn't have been made by the cheapest company available (if it was even a company and not just an intern from Universal). We've had terrible movies with better ads. Half of the world didn't know this was coming out, the other half wasn't interested in the slightest.

[Notshauna]

It was just a poorly made movie. It was intended to be a fantasy epic but, the script was terrible so no one knew what was going on. The first war is a mess of contradictory information in canon, and in order to tell the story from both the Orcish and Human perspective you need to develop a lot of information. And that's without them attempting to try and develop Thrall and the Burning Legion alongside the already massive cast of characters. Warcraft tried to balance out a cast of 12 major characters, 5 of which were completely CGI, in the time span of a single movie. Not even the first Lord of the Rings can achieve that goal as Boromir is incredibly forgettable.

The Warcraft movie could of worked if they focused purely on a human perspective, and cut the demonic storyline. But, it still wouldn't make money, the cost of the movie is absurd compared to the size of the Warcraft IP. Warcraft's a big name sure, but it has no where near the value of Star Wars, Marvel or Lord of the Rings, yet here it was trying to compete with the blockbuster in the summer movie slot.

[Tackhisis]

The studio shouldn't have cut half of the film in editting.

The director shouldn't have filmed twice the crap he did: 2h 03m is more than enough for a movie.

[Deleted]

Not even the first Lord of the Rings can achieve that goal as Boromir is incredibly forgettable.

Really? For me, Boromir was one of the things the film improved on the book - they gave him a sympathetic side (his relation with the halflings) and a great death ("our people... our people...I would have followed you, my brother, my captain, my king"). In the book, I just remember him being a bit of punk, to be honest. In the film, he was very memorable imo. (Think of the memes...)

The Warcraft movie could of worked if they focused purely on a human perspective, and cut the demonic storyline.

I doubt it - the human side of the movie was pretty dire, apart from Ragnar... Lothar? The orcs were pretty awesome - I tend to hate orcs in games and stories (what's there to like?) but damn, Warcraft had some fine voicing acting for the orcs. That scene of a couple of them, chilling out and watching the corruption Guldan was bringing to Azeroth, deciding to stop him - to enlist the help of the humans - was a standout in the film and it was just some mellow dialogue over dodgy CGI. Best orcs ever, imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KynTdfNXd74

/shivers

[Hammerfest]

But iirc it didn't turn a profit for Universal.

According to Wikipedia, the film had a $160M budget and made $433M at the box office. I'd call that a profit.

[Orby]

I liked the movie personally wasnt great by a long shot but as a fan of the Warcraft franchise there were things I liked out of it.

But if I have to make one complaint it's they should have based it more closely to the book 'The Last Guardian' by Jeff Grub. The movie tried to shove too much stuff in it. Less is more and they should have went with that approach.

The focus should have been on MEdivh, Khadgar and to one extent Lothar and King Llane, while Gul'Dan and Doomhammer on the horde side.

The movie had so many characters it didn't';t need to add yet.

[quras]

According to Wikipedia, the film had a $160M budget and made $433M at the box office. I'd call that a profit.

If that is what you are going by then you have no clue how movies work. Not just domestically but overseas as well when it comes to ROI.

I'll throw out a couple site you can read if you wont to help you get what people say when they say this movie didn't quite make a profit for the amount spent.

This one is an ROI on movies. It's a decent read for an overall idea. You'd have to get and read the whole book but what is shown is pretty good.

https://storyality.wordpress.com/201...on-investment/

This is one also a nice read on breaking even. A nice overall reading on it.
http://stason.org/TULARC/movies/curr...reak-even.html

While they spent 160M and brought in 433M but even that number is suspect given this article:
http://chinafilminsider.com/china-bo...come-scrutiny/

If you look up that Provence mentioned at the time of that flood. You can rest assured they were not going to the movies.


Either way, they needed closer to 450-500 Million after all expenditures given some expert postings at the time. Video sales may have pushed them into the black but not so much that I could see them risking such a large sum of money to make a part two. A second movie would get a much lower budget and could you imagine this movie with bad CGI orcs to boot?

We get Resident evils cranked out because their budget is so low. So the possible ROI on them is extremely high and much more possible than something like warcraft.

As this thread has shown. The warcraft movie was bad all across the board and in many areas. A huge budget wont save a movie like this when the direct blows his load on CGI to carry the movie when the rest falls so short of even being in the ball park of being good. (directer, story, acting, actors, pacing, edits - All bad to some extent). All it had was CGI and at times even that showed to be not well mixed into the sets.

There was a lot wrong with warcraft.

[Hammerfest]

If that is what you are going by then you have no clue how movies work.

So what you're trying to say is that the actual budget for the film was way more than the reported budget of $160M?

[Farrarie]

You cant do a Warcraft movie without a trilogy. one movie will not work, and the movie was better than the first lord of the ring movie of the trilogy. If you ask me.

[Zelk]

The story isn't that good, the acting was awful and the set design, some of the cgi and armour design was really really terrible. I get that shoulders are big in wow but it just looks fucking stupid.

[Protean]

instead of furthering the story they just keep making filler expansions. They really need to bite the bullet and do wow2 and warcraft 4.

Nobody would be happy about that and I can already predict how people will react:

WC4 is dead and here's 10 bulletpoints of my opinion stated as facts
Characters are bland and uninteresting
They only added X to make another NPCs for WoW 2
I prefer WC3 over WC4
I prefer WoW over WoW2
Why must things change
This is just another cashgrab
Shameless cash grab
Greedy Blizzard
They killed off Y but kept Z??
This story is boring they should have stuck with something else
They should have made a prequel instead
My favorite talent was not added to my class this time around
My favorite faction doesn't have this unit type I really liked

Did I get them all?

[Deleted]

What do you guys think went wrong?

US market is too obsessed with Rotten Tomatoes scores and can't decide for themselves what movie they want to watch, they need people to decide it for them. This kind of behaviour leaves a lot of room for corruption. Movie companies that pay reviewers get better scores than ones that don't. Look at all the Marvel movies that get insane scores even though they're mediocre action movies. Something seems fishy indeed. That doesn't mean Warcraft was better than Marvel movies, but it certainly didn't deserve the low scores it got.

The movie did fine in Europe and Asia. I think that does say something. It deserved more views in the US as well, and we would've gotten a sequal.

Besides that, one other point that hurt the movie was rushing to get it released. The start of the movie was a bit jumpy and didn't take the time to lay out the story background well enough. But past the intro the movie was pretty good if you ask me.

[Icaras]

In short I think the main problems were:

1- Travis Fimmel was a bad choice for Lothar. Ignoring his look, he just didn't act like the heroic knight I think this role demanded, plus there's also the problem of no matter how hard you try, you can't help but see him as his vikings characters (at least in a fantasy setting)

2- Having 2 sides to the story was a bad idea, it meant that we needed to setup the human side and the orc side and gave us less time to develop the war itself. While I know Blizzard loves their "Hey we made Orcs GOOD! isn't that differant!?" thing, I think this the film would have been better just casting the Horde as villains.
Plus I think going with the cannon ending of the humans losing, with a stinger leading into a warcraft 2 adaption, might have been better.

3- Garona was weird. Every other orc is CGI but for some reason she's a skinny green painted person? Just seems odd, I think they should have done a CGI version of Garona.

[quras]

So what you're trying to say is that the actual budget for the film was way more than the reported budget of $160M?

In a sense yes but what you are looking at is the PRODUCTION budget of 160M not complete budget. You will likely never see the full budget. Production budget is not the entire cost of the movie as one of those articles mentions.

That didn't included marketing (A&P) and while it wasn't marketed well in the U.S. It was heavily marketed in China unlike anything I've ever seen. They knew which audience were fanatics and they hit them hard with the marketing. If I can find it, I had a link that talked about what was done there and it's crazy when it comes to target marketing.



So, a whole plethora of things are not in the production budget. Also, things like the foreign sales which did the best vs the extremely low U.S. (47M which they get to keep almost a huge percentage of the ticket sales depending on how the deal is made and the decreasing gradient week after week).

The companies here only see 50% or less of the foreign ticket sales. So when you see the movie made 221M in China. 50% or less came back to the studios.

So using just the word budget isn't how things are reported. It's production budget of 160M and the cost is well above that for hopeful blockbusters.

EDIT:
This is the article that talks about what they did in China to really hit the fanatics there for warcraft. It's just over the top and about the only reason the movie made what it did if we are to believe the numbers.
http://variety.com/2016/film/asia/te...-s-1201794300/

[RobertoCarlos]

US market is too obsessed with Rotten Tomatoes scores and can't decide for themselves what movie they want to watch, they need people to decide it for them. This kind of behaviour leaves a lot of room for corruption. Movie companies that pay reviewers get better scores than ones that don't. Look at all the Marvel movies that get insane scores even though they're mediocre action movies. Something seems fishy indeed. That doesn't mean Warcraft was better than Marvel movies, but it certainly didn't deserve the low scores it got.

The movie did fine in Europe and Asia. I think that does say something. It deserved more views in the US as well, and we would've gotten a sequal.

Besides that, one other point that hurt the movie was rushing to get it released. The start of the movie was a bit jumpy and didn't take the time to lay out the story background well enough. But past the intro the movie was pretty good if you ask me.

Yeah the critics really stopped Batman vs superman from making money.

You have a point but lets not pretend the movie wasnt awful. Its not exactly making dvd sales is it so it wasnt some under appreciated gem that went under the radar