According to Gama Sutra and Joystiq, a film adaptation of World of Warcraft is apparently in the works, and to make things even more intriguing, the production team — Legendary Pictures — is the same one that worked on the fantastic Spartan adventure known as ‘Frank Miller’s 300‘.
I never did get into the whole World of Warcraft thing, but I can totally see the appeal of a game-movie like this. Even though most movies based on video games have been remarkably bad — I need not remind you of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s take on Street Fighter — they can oftentimes do reasonably well on the silver screen, thanks to rabid fans of that particular series. That is, unless they enlist Uwe Boll (House of the Dead, Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark…) to do the flick. On the flip side, you can cash in on nostalgia, just like the Transformers movie.
World of Warcraft has a worldwide subscriber base of about 8 million people, and while that sounds like a very impressive number, they’ll need to get non-WoW fans on board as well if they hope to make it as big a blockbuster as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or Spider-Man. After all, I’m pretty sure they’re not going to stop at just one movie.
In the meantime, where’s the Halo movie? Or the Diablo movie? Wii Sports?
A Diablo movie has been semi-confirmed to be in the works and some speculate that there’s a new Diablo game to be announced at this year’s Blizzcon.
As a former World of Warcraft addict, I’m almost entirely sure anything even remotely associated with the franchise will make a sick amount of money.
Hmm, “game-movies” shouldn’t really go into theaters… Straight to DVD would be better… Why put a movie in Theaters that only about 5% of people will know what it’s about/understand it…
Ed pretty much summed it up.. The simple reason that WoW is already immensely popular means that people will go after the movie blindly. All that is left is to convince the non-WoW guys as you said.
The Halo movie project was almost set to go this summer in New Zealand but it fell through. I’m sure this project will eventually get picked up off the shelf.
I’ve been playing Warcraft since the first one came out several years ago… I’ve also wasted my fair share of time on Wow. Would love to see this movie come together and I’m sure it would do well since the comics and fantasy movies have been doing so well lately.