This could be interesting. I wonder if the story will be new or based on a story from the game.

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As the resident WoW nerd and lore fanatic, I of course will have to chime in on the Warcraft movie.

Last I heard about a WoW movie, there was talk about doing Teldrassil and the events surrounding that. Know what I'm talking about? Course not. So I doubt that.

The Warcraft movie has a lot of directions it could go, but since it is being based on the MMO, I'm going to assume it's going to cover a period already established in the lore, probably during the game itself. I doubt they'll do something that hasn't already happened, as that would tie them down in future expansions.

It's difficult, though, because all the major interesting events have been covered in game. They could easily rehash any number of very epic and interesting moments, but then I feel like Warcraft fans wouldn't be as interested, since we know how the story ends. You could pick a lesser known event, but then it has to be big and interesting enough for the screen.

Videogame movies always have this difficult line to tow, between catering to the fans and trying to make a movie that regular nongamer moviegoers can watch and enjoy. I think Warcraft has an even more difficult situation on it's hands because of the absolutely massive following of the game, and the diversity of that following.

We can at least take heart in the pedigree behind the project. Blizzard doesn't attach it's name to crap, and Warcraft is obviously the most important name the company has right now. And they're obviously willing to get some talent on the project, no Uwe Boll here.

One final note, I'm assuming the movie will be "canon", because of the level of seriousness Blizzard takes with it's lore now. However, one way to make a good movie and sidestep a lot of the difficulties I describe above would be to do a "what if" scenario, in a parallel universe type of deal. Wouldn't even be that hard to tie into the existing lore, probably along the lines of the Infinite Dragonflight and their constant meddling in Azeroth's history. As I said before, there's a lot of ways they could take this thing.

Finally, best news out of this? Sam Raimi = BRUCE CAMPBELL CAMEO.

Heck they could make the lead character Bruce Campbell playing a Warrior, then it wouldn't even matter what the story is.

Yeah, even if Bruce Campbell just has a Cameo that'd be awesome.

Personally, what I'd home is that they went back to the original origins of the lore. Not way way back, but like Warcraft 1 story sort of stuff. Explaining the ties between humans and orcs.

Everyone who plays the games now knows where they're at, some even know where it began, but the people who are new to the series(IE probably a lot of WoW users and the general public) have no idea what happened in the beginning.

It'd probably be an awesome way to both advertise the game, and bring people up to speed. Expose people to the original groundwork, or a more simplified version of it. It'll probably help enrich the experience for current users and also possibly interest people who may not have understood the lore of the game, or been scared off of the game for different reasons.

1) Crtl-F
2) Find: the Warcraft movie
3) Replace: the first Warcraft movie
4) Replace All
5) OK

Well Moik, that assumes it's successful. It's got a lot of cards in it's favor, and it certainly has the lore to tell a lot of stories. Could say the same thing about Final Fantasy, though.

What you talk about Noel runs counter to what I said before, as everybody who plays WoW knows how that initial conflict turned out. But, that didn't really stop the LoTR movies from being awesome. It's certainly possible that they'd do that origin story, and it'd probably still be really good. The only problem I see with that is how little it ties into WoW as a self contained game. You're really only dealing with a handful of the races in that initial conflict. So no Draenei, Night Elves, Tauren, Undead, and all the associated lore characters. It doesn't resonate as strongly with a lot of the playerbase.

I have to realize that I'm in the minority in this situation, knowing so much about the history of Warcraft. I hope to hear a tale I haven't heard before, but realistically that probably won't happen. There's a lot of targets to hit here, and it'll be so hard to please everyone.

Blizzard themselves could be tired of existing story lines as well and want to explore an unexpected Wrath of Khan style option, grabbing something from obscurity.

But, anyways yeah, Spirits Within was a bomb, only took in 80mil, cost like over 130. Advent Children though has sold nearly 11 million copies, despite FF7 selling under 10 million copies while being the best-selling in the franchise.

It's only one graph point, but that gives us an indication that a movie can outsell the game it's based on.

Extrapolate that with WoW's numbers.

In the end, profitability is going to really depend on budget. Square spent over 100 million on both their movies, so they made barely anything. From what I've been reading, Square's decision to make another movie was actually more to sell games and hype the franchise than to net a profit of box office receipts.

Blizzard may just be looking at a movie as a way to re-enamour ex-players and bait them back in, or pique the imagination/interest of non-players and expand their yearly subscriptions further. I could see that becoming a repeated process.

In the former case, it's in their best interest to use completely new content so that those ex-players will go 'Oh wow, I didn't see any of this when I played. What have I been missing?"

My money is on trilogy of new stories.

I still don't think it'll be a story set beyond the point the MMO has already reached. At this point, if they suggest something for the future of Azeroth, then they'd be locked into it when developing expansions and future games. Given how Bliz develops, I don't think they'd want to be locked into anything until it's gone to press.

Even if they did do something new, it would only serve to devalue the game world. If the movie shows events that would later be covered in the MMO, it'd decrease their impact.

It's possible they could do some really recent events, like what's been happening in the latest expansion. That would serve well to get former players interested, and maybe show the level of epic the game has gotten to. But that'd be harder to sell to a normal audience, because of the tremendous backstory involved.

I dunno, it's just so hard to tell what's going to happen. When they drop a few hints as to the setting of the movie, I'll have a much better idea what's going on.

I'm still bettering on an origin story. It's probably one of the few things they can do. You mentioned how everyone already knows the whole story, but truth be told I'm sure the vast majority really don't know all of the lore. They know whats currently going on but very little of the underlying details.

When it comes to lore I consider myself roughly what the average user who hasn't touched any of the books, and only played a few of the previous games, some not even to completion. As you've pointed out with me on a few occasions I really don't know a lot of anything about the lore. I know that there's some evil guys named titans, and that there's two factions, and that you kill a lot of these significant to lore boss characters. Beyond that, I'm not sure whats going on.

Going into an origin story would totally bring out the roots that a lot of casual and long-term players may have glassed over cause they were more concerned with gameplay, playing the newest raid, and getting the right skill/talent/equipment set to play the actual game.

An origin story would be the most perfect case(Even though it wouldn't involve a whole lot of races, probably just humans and orcs) because it would expose both new to the series, and new to the story people to wonder, "This game I've been playing/hearing about seems to have such a rich story. I'd really like to explore that further."

And when you think about it, it's probably the only thing they can do without writing themselves into a corner or pissing off a lot of long-time, die-hard fans. They definitely can't start into some story in the middle of whats currently, or what has gone on in the middle of the World of Warcraft or else they run the risk of alienating all except the die-hard.

TL;DR - Origin story is the only thing that'll satisfy both groups of movie go-ers. Story based on WoW events would be too complicated for anyone other than WoW players.