Sam Raimi's Warcraft

[Theangryone]

We need a WoW movie from Michael Bay or Zack Snyder.

[Magnagarde]

It's a good thing he didn't get his vision through. It is also a good thing that there are no new Warcraft movies either because so many directors and actors can't keep their bizzare viewpoints away from works of fantasy, attempting to insert real world issues into them or use them as an opportunity to virtue signal.

[Lochton]

We need a WoW movie from Michael Bay or Zack Snyder.

Not sure I feel like sitting through a 4-hour long movie..

[Pakheth]

Imagine if the warcraft movie was made by Uwe Boll.

If I recall correctly Uwe Boll did request to make a movie based on a Blizzard IP and they responded with "Over our dead company."

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We need a WoW movie from Michael Bay or Zack Snyder.

If Snyder then at least it would be a very cinematically pleasing movie.

[Wilian]

No the movie didn't do well bc the studio chopped the movie up

The movie was shit from getgo.

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If I recall correctly Uwe Boll did request to make a movie based on a Blizzard IP and they responded with "Over our dead company."

Damn, we are getting Uwe Boll Blizzard movie.

[MoanaLisa]

The real problem with the movie was that it was 8-10 years too late. It wasn't a great movie in any case and yes, the studio took out stuff that Jones thought was critical to having the movie make sense for people who had never been part of the game.

But it was years too late to be anything but a mid-level movie. Now it's even later.

[username993720]

We need a WoW movie from Michael Bay or Zack Snyder.

Hell no.

/10 char

[MCMLXXXII]

Not sure I feel like sitting through a 4-hour long movie..

Exactly what Warcraft needs, Megan Fox as Garona, lens flare and a blue filter.
On the other hand, if it flops, two years later we get a Snyder cut, which will be reviewed as the best thing since bread came sliced but is just the same turd but then longer.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The Warcraft movie flopped for multiple reasons.

1. waaaaay too late. By 2016, Warcraft had long since fallen out of the mainstream.
2. CGI movies were no longer novel. It had been 7 years since Avatar started the CGIfest trend. People were already fed up with superhero movies. The movie REALLY had to stand on its merits as a story or a fun movie... and since this movie was being made by modern Hollywood, it had pretty much no chance of being good.
3. The story was boring and the characters (or more precisely, the actors) were boring.

Sam Raimi might not have been able to salvage the plot, but he absolutely could have made the characters likeable, if he had been given free reign.

[Linkedblade]

The movie failed because they tried to have 7 main characters

Yeah, this pretty much. WoW has to be like the MCU. Take a movie per character to introduce the characters, then have them all together in later movies.

[GMZohar1]

If Sam Raimi did the movie 99% wouldn't have been CGI, Orcs would not have been the size of houses, the 2 major issues with the movie

[Askyl]

To make things clear. The movie DID DO WELL. Just not in US, but it box'd more than enough internationally for a sequel.

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If Sam Raimi did the movie 99% wouldn't have been CGI, Orcs would not have been the size of houses, the 2 major issues with the movie

How is Orcs being the correct size being an issue?

[Paperfox]

I still think they made the wrong movie. If they had made a movie based on the lore the viewer wouldn't have had to be a fan to enjoy it, although doing so enhances your enjoyment of it. However it seemed that they wanted to explain the history/a big lore moment and so it was the first in a series of movies that did this.

Unlike WoW, there wasn't a lot of humor in it, nor were there many elves.

[Wavebossa]

Interestingly enough, everyone I know who saw the movie - and has never played the games - truly loved it. They found it easy enough to follow, and they honestly enjoyed it.
The people I know who hated it are the WoW fans.

I personally do not think you have to be a WoW fan to enjoy the movie. I think people overestimate the lore barrier on this one the same way they overestimate the lore barrier for the Witcher series on Netflix.

[username993720]

To make things clear. The movie DID DO WELL. Just not in US, but it box'd more than enough internationally for a sequel.

China is not an indicator.

[Askyl]

China is not an indicator.

Yes, in our world we have China and US. Nothing else ;D

[Plehnard]

To make things clear. The movie DID DO WELL. Just not in US, but it box'd more than enough internationally for a sequel.

No it didn't really.
The only market where a film gets more of the box office than 50% is the US and that was the weakest market, the strongest one for the film was China which has the lowest percentage with 25% for foreign films.

So of that ~440 Million Box office it got roughly ~170 against a 160Million production budget and that does not include expenses like promotion/commercials which usually adds another 50-100 million world wide for a hollywood film.
With DVD/Blueray sales (~17Million known for the US) it most likely barely got even.

[Drindorai]

The movie wasn't bad but going half/half human/orc in terms of screentime as well as involving Medivh was just too much for one movie. At least for the first entry for a movie for anyone unfamiliar with it.

My parents watched it on...HBO? One of those ten thousand services that exist now a few months ago because they knew I used to play it and I remember them saying they didn't hate it but it was way too complicated if you were unfamiliar with the setting.

They could have gotten to a place where they had a thousand main characters like the movie tried to do and it not feel cluttered, but that's something you do after you build up the franchise.

I have no preference with starting with Warcraft 1 or Warcraft 3, but it is curious to think of how it could have gone had they focused the movie on Arthas' rise and fall. Essentially do each Warcraft 3 campaign as a movie. You could probably combine Orcs/Night Elves into one movie as well in order to keep it a trilogy.

There was a lot about it that I quite enjoyed but it was mired with meddling from the company in terms of the story instead of just doing the thing that worked before but in a new format. You don't need to just copy/paste Warcraft 1's story but trying to do Rise of the Horde in addition to Warcraft 1 and then not even ending on Warcraft 1's ending with Stormwind being destroyed was silly.

All the stuff with Durotan having a much larger role in the events of Warcraft 1 was a waste as was the fight with Gul'dan at the end, which felt weird and not how that character we knew from the games would do it. Gul'dan secretly ordering the assassination of Durotan and Draka was how he'd act, not drink fel juice and fist fight him. They could have just used Garona and Doomhammer if they wanted major Orc characters to be around and have Durotan and Draka be secondary characters and then at the end of the movie tease Alterac and all that.

[shise]

It was definitely a good film.
The problem, big problem, is that it made little sense, hence rendering it as a failure.

They decided to make a mix of characters, lore, reality and non reality that was just odd. They also picked a fragment of a chapter of Warcraft...somewhere in the middle of it, no begining, no end.

Would they have gone full nerd blast, pick Arthas and go on from its origins.. they might have ended up having themselvs a pretty successful trilogy on the making to define all of the Lich King lore.

But they went safe instead, too safe, and that backfired badly.

[Tiwack]

When you have to clarify how you want a movie to be to a director, you're not really allowing them to do their job in the first place and that much will be present in the end-results as well.

If they were serious about enticing new players to give the game a spin afterwards they would've planned for more than a single movie, allowed for plenty of creative freedom and let the players join the game on their own terms with the ability to draw their own conclussions instead of going with hamfisting and spoonfeeding them everything at once.

Would it have been so bad to portray orcs as nothing but evil and then have new players discover via the game or subsequent cinema portrayals that it wasn't the case? I think not.