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More Details on The Warcraft Movie
Gamespot had a talk with Paul Sams, Blizzard COO, and dug up some additional details on the Warcraft film. From the article: "We're not trying to take what we've done and...try to make a literal translation to the big screen. What we want to do is to make a great movie that happens to be set in a video game universe. That's a differentiator, and a key differentiator. A lot of it comes down to picking the right people. A lot of the other video game movies that have come out before this haven't had the budgets, the right people, and haven't had the right mindset. We and Legendary want to make a great film, an event picture, big-budget picture, that is a great stand-alone, fantasy-based movie that is good for you regardless of whether you're familiar with the Warcraft universe."
Except Tron was a movie first and a video game later. It did not have to live up to anybody's expectations. It was a blank slate. Millions of people have played the Warcraft Series and many of them have something different that they really love, that probably wont be captured in the live-action movie version.
The style of Warcraft, and all other Blizzard games, is a big thing for me. The opening cinematic for World of Warcraft is damn near to photo-realistic and still captures their over-the-top style. I'm sure that there will be plenty of CGI orcs, trolls, etc. in the movie, so why not go all out and really wow us by giving the fans what we've wanted for years?
I hope they still make a great movie despite their choices, and that this wont just be a quick cash-in.
(Note: All numbers adjusted for inflation).
Ahh, yes, lack of money. Let's look at some video game movie budgets. Resident Evil: Apocalypse was $44MM. The recent Silent Hill was $50MM. The charming Super Mario Bros. was about $57MM. Oh, and we all liked that Doom movie: it cost $70MM. And who could forget Tomb Raider at a whopping $87MM.
Now, I've sat through most of these movies. At no point did I look into the screen and say... "Wow, if they only had more money, this would've been so much better."
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
You don't base the movie on the game. If you do, you're already sunk because then the whole driving force becomes making the movie into a random smorgasboard of "bits" (gotta have character types X Y and Z, scenes with terrain types P D and Q, etc.) No. If you want to try for a serious fantasy movie you have to treat the game as something reflecting a 'reality' in game terms. You then base your movie on that imaginary universe. Make a movie that reflects that same reality in movie terms. Then you at least have a chance. You need a strongly imagined universe for this to work, but it just might work here. The warcraft background is reasonably well detailed. It's still one hell of a "might" though. I wish them luck.
I hope they still make a great movie despite their choices, and that this wont just be a quick cash-in.
If wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak.
Seriously, how can this be anything other than an attempt to cash in on the game?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.