New Details, Concept Art For Warcraft Film Emerge From BlizzCon

Growing up, I recall having a special place in my game-playing arsenal for Warcraft. When it went online in the form of World of Warcraft in more recent years, I declined to play along.

Instead, I made the mistake of tinkering with EverQuest II.

If you’ve ever played an MMO, you know there’s pretty much no such thing as “tinkering” with such a game. You either devote a seriously significant part of your life to it or you don’t play at all.

In my first year “tinkering” with EverQuest II along with many of my real-life friends, I donated an obscene amount of my non-work time. I spent something like three out of 12 months on that game.

I’ve replaced my time spent there with HollywoodChicago.com. Since I’ve digressed from the point of this post, though, I’ll now get to it.

Warcraft is being made into a film, and though it is very early in its development, details emerged about it at BlizzCon, which took place in Anaheim, Calif. from Aug. 3 to 4.

Though IMDb slates the film to have a 2008 release, this report from ComingSoon.net cites 2009 and says:

They confirmed the Warcraft movie will be live action (rather than animated) with a yet-to-be determined level of CG environments and effects.

Blizzard’s Paul Sams, Chris Metzen and Legendary Pictures chief creative officer Jon Jashni said they did not want to “create another video game movie”. They want to “create an epic”.

The script is still in the works and there is no director [at this time]. They did confirm the story would take place about a year before the events in World of Warcraft take place.

Concept art for the new Warcraft film
Image courtesy of Kotaku.com

The scene at BlizzCon
Photo courtesy of BlizzCon
GameSpot also cites a 2009 release and says Legendary is targeting a budget of approximately $100 million.