What went wrong with Warcraft?

[Hammerfest]

I think they all had a hand in screwing it up. Jones and metzen are not immune to the finger pointing and damage they did to the film but neither is the studio.

What did they do, specifically?

[quras]

What did they do, specifically?

Off the top of my head the acting was terrible and it's the directors job to make that happen. Not to mention many of the scenes and sets.
Combine that with the poor use of 160M with so much being placed on CGI orcs to the detriment of the rest of the movie just makes things worse. They you look at the pacing of the movie and you can bet Jones as well as the studio had a hand in that. Worse yet would be if he didn't carry enough clout with him and he was ran over by the studio as well on choices.

I'm a firm believe that metzen and his warped love of ORCs above all things worked its way into the writing. Before the movie came out we had to listen to some garbage of we want people to love orcs. We want them to see them in a different light and some other such nonsense. Thats not what happened during at particular bit of history but with metzen getting his hands into the writing on the movie. I have no doubt he got his warped vision into the writing and direction of the movie.

[melodramocracy]

I think the movie had a difficult time trying to strike some balance between appeasing fans of the game while being palatable to a newcomer. Folks expecting LotR out of this were being unrealistic, as those movies are afforded far more time to tell a story that involves a more direct story, nevermind how much better that story is in the first place).

My better half, who has never played Warcraft and knows nothing about it, had no trouble following along with the movie, but I can see how some people would be wondering what was going on in some parts of it.

I don't think it was a 'terrible' movie. I'm let down that the extended version never made it out to market, as most movies tend to benefit from added footage weaved back in. I do think they picked the wrong Warcraft story to tell for this movie, but this seems to be all we'll get.

[McNeil]

I do wonder how a Warcraft movie would look if Sam Raimi was directing it, which would've been released at least 8 years earlier then. He originally had a whole different script where the movie takes place between WC3: TFT and WoW, focussing on a new human character who is described as the ''anti-Thrall''. But the movie would be to much focussed on the Alliance while they wanted both factions to have shared screen time. Imo this ultimately ended up being a mistake because the movie was having serious pacing issues.

Ideally I would have the movie to start with the Arthas story where they are not afraid to tell the players that its not an Alliance vs Horde movie. Its one of the few Warcraft stories that is incredibly well written, and if the directing is done right I would go as far as to say that its the new or even better LotR of this era. The story of the First War is just incredibly bland and generic which would've fit better as a Hobbit-like prequel to the original trilogy. I'm really surprised that they didn't even show the most awesome parts of WC1, like the orcs storming out of the portal to instantly invade Azeroth (instead just casually walking trough it, set up a camp and randomly pillage some villages. Such blood crazed orcs....) and ofcourse the destruction of Stormwind City. A great ending for the Alliance Pov is where they flee with boats in the harbor as the orcs march in, Lothar gives an angry look at all the orcs screaming to the boats as he saisl off and watches Stormwind burn, then be greeted by the people of Lordaeron who promises the people of Stormwind that they will help get their land back. While on the orc side they say that they are interested in conquering the rest of the human kingdoms of Lordaeron aswell.

[Powerogue]

It relied too much on the pre-existing lore to make sense to newcomers, but changed too much of the pre-existing lore to where people who understood that just got even more confused.

It's also got a bit of "The Last Airbender" syndrome where it again tries to pack a long story into a comparatively small movie and winds up cutting a lot of context that makes sense of the events. (i'm told from these other posters there was like 40 minutes of cut content? I'd buy the DVD if I could see that!)

For what it's worth I really enjoyed it, but it required me to be in full throttle of "it's just a movie don't think on it too hard" to do so. I'm typically a person that can enjoy a story with plot holes as long as the story is cohesive enough and a fun ride.

[therealstegblob]

The problem primarily, to my understanding, was bad script management plain and simple.

Blizzard had early scripts that focused more on telling the original story, Riami didn't like this and wanted rewrites, internal arguments, Riami drops out, Duncan Jones comes in, script goes through several more shitty rewrites and what we ended up with was a confused, stupid and nonsensical plothole filled mess.

The movie is a fucking mess. It's not a good movie taken as an adaptation and it's not a good movie taken as it's own thing. Once it proved to do alright in the box office, I noticed they very subtly began to refer to it as "Warcraft: The First Adventure" (or some other shit like that), as if to confirm they indeed want to do sequels. I truly hope they don't.

It's a shitty fucking movie.

[Deleted]

The film was too fast, too many things going on, too many characters introduced etc... People not familiar with warcraft will have a hard time knowing who anyone is and what they're talking about.

I thought it was an okay film as a warcraft fan, but i can't see how anyone who is not already a warcraft fan could enjoy this movie.

They should have slowed the pace and took more time building the world instead of dotting from location to location and spent more time building the characters up. Its like the film expects the viewer is already somewhat familiar with warcraft lore/characters, which also doesn't work as the film changed the lore...

- - - Updated - - -

• Dull, overused story arch
• Too short to tell it anyway
• Personally, I thought the CGI was overused and looked poor
• The costumes looked like mid tier cosplay garb

I agree with this. Espeically on the CGI and costume design. There are some scenes where the CGI is just terrible and the costume design really did make me think of cosplay. For a film with such a massive budget it really did come across as a low budget fan film at times.
Also poor actors, the acting in the film just sucked, again with such a large budget could they not get at least 1 good actor to carry them?