The pacing was insane. Also, Dalaran shouldn’t be floating already, that only happened after it was destroyed by Archimonde and rebuilt after.
1 Like
Not a knock at you Frozen, but this line right here is the key reason why they couldn’t just dive straight in on what everyone seems to be calling the “interesting lore.”
In fact, I think I can sum that up with a classic George Carlin line:
With rare exception, if your film has to dive into a massive lore dump from the word go, you’ve already lost about half your viewers. Lord of the Rings worked mainly because it was a simple enough good versus evil story framed around the final battle against Sauron at the end of the Second Age.
- Sauron crafts the Rings
- Sauron deceives everyone and crafts the One Ring in an attempt to enslave the world
- The Last Alliance fights Sauron at Mount Doom
- Isildur keeps the Ring rather than destroy it, Ring is lost upon his death
Everything else important enough to the overall story gets filled in over the course of the rest of the films.
Meanwhile, you have Warcraft. If you attempt to start it at any point after the first two games, then you need to cover the following in an exposition dump:
- The opening of the Dark Portal
- The Burning Legion
- Azeroth and Draenor
- The Alliance and The Horde
- Potentially some of the key characters that are still around in either WC3 or WoW
- Why the orcs aren’t actually evil
And that’s a very basic list. I feel like that’s the bare minimum of what you need to cover, and much of that goes beyond a simple “Here are the heroes, here are the villains, and here is where the story starts.”
Not to mention raided by Arthas.
Well, I’ve seen several people think it was a plan of theirs from the start, but that just makes no damn logical sense.
3D modeling/CG characters are NOT cheap to make. The film was something like 80% done when that first trailer came out. Having the redo ALL the shots of Sonic was done at great expense, delayed the film a fair amount, and if memory serves me, that actually put the effects studio that worked on the first film out of business.
Trust me, a studio is NOT going to waste time and money on a bait and switch of that magnitude.
As a WoW fan, I absolutely loved it. I’ve seen it a dozen times.
Keep in mind I was high all those times, so ymmv.
2 Likes
It was a solid “I’ll watch it if there’s nothing else on” movie. It wasn’t good enough for me to want to go out of my way to see it again, and it wasn’t so bad that I regretted seeing it in the first place.
If it weren’t for my connection to the WoW franchise I imagine it would have been an average forgettable fantasy movie. I don’t mean that it was bad per se, but in the end that’s probably a negative since it wasn’t memorable in any sort of way positive or negative. If it made it to so bad it was good then there might have been more buzz about it.
Oh well. It made its money. I doubt Blizzard is going to try at cinema again any time soon. If they do I hope they pick a better storyline like Warcraft 3.
I think if you’re not aware of Warcraft’s lore it is a good movie… If you do know the lore, it is up for you to decide.
I didn’t like it personally and I’m not a huge lore hound.
3 Likes
All these years later, and it’s still a horrible movie lol. It didn’t age well. In other news Halo is a pretty good videogame tv show 
this cgi monstrosity
You do realize that is Thrall…Correct?
yeah,
still a cgi monstrosity
I liked it, but I’m also not super critical of movies.
It was a fun watch.
Everyone I know that loves WoW or heard about WoW went to the movies to see it,
The problem though at the time was everyone saw it for free, cheating their way around the internet to see it earlier, something to do with China.
I think that’s just a problem with Hollywood in general. In all adaptations, stuff has to go. In some cases it works out fine, and in others they try to get rid of too many important parts and replace it with stuff that’ll hold the attention of those with minimal attention spans.
Case in point: Lord of the Rings.
To this day, there are a subset of folks that actually think Fellowship was hurt by the absence of Tom Bombadil, but considering that LotR is lore dense in its own right, if any one character was getting cut, it was him.
That’s an instance of a cut working out fine, but all too often they cut things that are extremely important or they try to oversimplify something.
Plus, there’s also the case of things that are just hard to adapt in general. I think most of us that are old enough to have seen the Super Mario Brothers film in theaters back in 1993 can attest to the fact that in hindsight, that was NOT a video game to attempt adapting into live action.
On the opposite end, you have things that really shouldn’t be hard to adapt, yet the ball gets massively dropped and so many changes are made that you have to sit back and wonder if anyone in the writer’s room or on the production team even bothered to watch/read the source material (the recent Halo series and Cowboy Bebop come to mind)
If you ask me, I think one key issue Hollywood has is cutting the wrong stuff, then thinking they’re smarter than the fans that speak up when they bring up legitimate concerns.
I thought it was okay. Saw it in the theater and watched it two more times since then.
all three LOTR movies should have been shown in theaters the entire extended version with a intermission
It was on ok film but a huge miss in not being good enough to kick off a great movie franchise. Garona didn’t look good in make up and should have been cgi like the other Orcs (I know she’s half Orc), much of the human armor pieces looked like plastic toys, and it was just trying to cram too much story into one movie. Also, as others have mentioned I think the Warcraft story would best fit a series and not a movie, and should probably be animated.
With that said, I hope we don’t get another Warcraft series/movie for some time, given today’s political/cultural climate. I can already see it, each Warcraft race would be a real life multicultural melting pot. Might as well call it World of LondonCraft. Things like that are why I couldn’t finish watching the Witcher, and why I can’t stomach most modern day fantasy or historical films.
1 Like
Very fair assessment in my mind as a viewer that generally tries to look at things from a critical angle, as well as the angle for why certain changes are made.
Honestly, I tend to find that those that enjoyed it the most are those that didn’t enter with deep knowledge of the lore.
As for the rest of us, we run the gamut from understanding why some changes were made, yet still enjoying it, all the way to disowning the film solely because it was a Warcraft film as opposed to WC3/WoW.
Some theaters actually did just that this past December for the 20th anniversary of the first film.
Would have loved to go, but lacked the time/money. Plus, the one place near me that was doing that event was still partaking in Clown World BS at the time.
2 Likes
There’s a soft reboot movie in the works.
Only rumored and never officially confirmed. Doesn’t help that the rumor has been floating around for the better part of two years now.
Until you see Blizzard, Universal, or Legendary make an actual official announcement about pre-production or a release window, assume it isn’t happening.
That’s the other big issue with films and TV as of late.
Too many production companies, actors, writers, etc. have become far more concerned with using their projects as a soapbox rather than telling a good story.
When the first question about anything now is “Is the film woke?” you know things are in a bad spot.
People go to movies to be entertained, or to learn the story about something in the case of a biopic or film covering a historic event. The average person does NOT want to be reminded of the issues of the world or told why they are a bad person for two hours.
Regardless of political affiliation, until companies stop with this nonsense and get back to actually trying to tell a good story, you’re going to see more and more productions fall short of projected goals and have the people in charge scratching their heads and wondering what went wrong.
2 Likes