Posts with tag warcraft-film

A few weeks ago, Hollywood headlines were filled with talk that director Sam Raimi is trying to secure Hilary Swank for his next film, Oz: The Great and Powerful. Now, I know that's not especially interesting to the Warcraft community, but it got me thinking about the Warcraft film again, since Raimi will eventually be directing it. Who will Raimi try to cast in the Warcraft movie?

Then around the same time, the WoW Insider team got word on the further developments of Michele Morrow's campaign to land the role of Sylvanas Windrunner. This sparked the idea that someone on staff should put together a dream cast for the future Warcraft movie. As the token film school dropout, I jumped on the assignment and promptly put together the most expensive movie cast list ever.

Be sure to let us know what your picks for the Warcraft film would be!

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Last week, Badass News posted an article detailing an interview with director Duncan Jones in which the Warcraft movie was one of the main topics of discussion. Jones is the son of David Bowie and director of the impressive science fiction flick Moon, as well as Source Code, another sci-fi title being released later this year. Though the interview reveals nothing about the production of the Warcraft movie, Jones thinks that the film is going to break the ongoing trend of terrible film adaptations of video games.

In the article, Jones says he believes it's possible to make a good adaptation -- it just has to be approached properly. "A good game adaptation is where you find the story or the emotional aspect that's at the heart of a computer game and you replicate that on film. It doesn't mean you need to have first person perspective or try and capture the mechanics of a game," he says.

Jones thinks the Warcraft film will be the film to break the mold because director Sam Raimi seems to be approaching the film correctly. "From the little I've read of interviews with him, the way he's approaching it makes so much sense. It's what I was talking about – it's not worrying about how the game plays, it's about creating the world of the game and investing the audience in that world."

Jones explains that he's a serious gamer himself and is skeptical about other directors who claim the same. He doesn't think most directors have the time to be both hardcore gamers and filmmakers. Jones, on the other hand, says he stays up all night to accommodate his gaming habit and cites titles like Starcraft 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops. He also says he's looking forward to Diablo 3.

Jones admits that he's "hugely jealous" of Raimi's getting the chance to direct the Warcraft film; the writer of the article goes so far as to suggest that Jones have a chance at directing it, since Raimi set it aside to work on The Great and Mighty Oz. That's not really quite how Hollywood works, though, so unless Raimi steps down from the project himself, I wouldn't count on his losing the project just yet.

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There's a rumor going around that Australian actor David Wenham (who you'll probably know as Faramir in Lord of the Rings, though he was also in 300 and Van Helsing) is supposed to play Arthas in the upcoming Sam Raimi-directed Warcraft movie -- but not so fast. The whole thing appears to stem from a listing over on the Internet Movie Database's listing for Warcraft (which, by the way, seems to have a working title -- a few days ago, it was just called "Untitled Sam Raimi Project"), where Wenham's name was inserted as rumored to play Arthas. That in and of itself means nothing at all -- the IMDb can be updated and edited by almost anyone that comes to the site, and while it could be that Wenham's agent is trying to get his name out there for a certain part, it's just as likely that some overzealous Lord of the Rings fan is trying to do some casting of their own. Wenham's name under there as "rumored" has about as much validity as a mention on Wikipedia: not much.

Oh, and there's one more issue -- as discussed in this forum post, Arthas himself probably won't even be in the Warcraft movie, if what Blizzard told us at BlizzCon a little while back is to be believed. Back at the BlizzCon 2007 movie panel, we were told by the panel (including Chris Metzen) that the movie is supposed to start a year before WoW begins, which means Arthas is sitting up in Icecrown doing a whole lot of nothing. When fans specifically asked about Arthas, we were told that while the movie would certainly reference him, it likely wouldn't focus on him at all. So while Wenham (or his fans) may be angling for the part of Arthas, even if he got it, he probably wouldn't get much screen time anyway.

Of course, that's assuming that what we were told two years ago still holds. Gary Whitta, who worked on a screenplay for the film, says that Sam Raimi has his own ideas about the movie, so, as BlizzPlanet points out, maybe he wants Arthas front and center. But for now, the David Wenham rumor is still just a made-up rumor, and a really thin one at that.