Today at Bliz­zCon 2007 we have heard our first solid and inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion with regards to the War­craft, or to some, the World of War­craft Movie. This movie will be big, huge, EPIC even — in fact, Thomas Tull (pro­ducer of 300) stated a bud­get of over $100m would be com­mit­ted, with a pro­jected 2009 release date. Leg­endary Pic­tures are 100% com­mit­ted to this project, it shall be a “tent-pole”, some­thing to stand next to and say “we did that!” — whilst remain­ing true to the game and fan base.

The plot for the film will take place approx­i­mately a year before the start of World of War­craft, includ­ing races you have played and lands you have wan­dered in, where lots of plot arcs are melded into a two and a half hour story. The film itself will revolve around a ‘badass’ new hero, with a theme towards con­flict and cul­ture — being a War Movie rather than a quest movie, from an Alliance’s per­spec­tive.

“It’s actu­ally not like the great adven­ture. It’s not so much a quest movie. It’s more of a war movie. Well, okay, it’s absolutely a war movie. Cul­tures grind­ing up to a hor­ri­ble moment where it just all spills over and gets out of con­trol. Less of an adven­ture party quest-type sit­u­a­tion. More of an armies build­ing to an inevitable con­clu­sion type situation.”

And w.r.t to the Alliance:

“While my heart lies with the Horde and Thrall’s an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter, from a movie mak­ing stand­point, a block­buster movie its a lit­tle rough to try and tell it from the per­spec­tive of this green look­ing dude.”

No direc­tor or cast have yet been assigned to the project and Tull stated that rec­og­niz­able actors to play main roles was not a necessity:

“We are start­ing those con­ver­sa­tions. We’re going to be look­ing for some­one of Zak Sny­der (300) or Chris Nolan (The Dark Knight, Bat­man Beings) calibre,”

The not so good news — seems they are aim­ing for PG-13 con­tent which claims to be a com­pro­mise. I per­son­ally miss the days of old when action heroes swore blindly.

“I can tell you that this is the one thing about run­ning a stu­dio and mak­ing these things that’s hard. You want to not com­pro­mise and have the right level of inten­sity. The story and the director’s vision is what’s ulti­mately going to dic­tate that. Per­son­ally one of my favorite movies of all time is Lord of the Rings, which has a PG-13 rating.”

The film is still in its script­ing process, but Tull stated that they are cur­rently work­ing with some­thing that they are very happy with.

And now for the first piece of con­cept art of the Teldrassil:

Other Q & A info:

Classes will be in the movie, but can’t give details since still in script­ing process, not exactly clear and we don’t know yet, but we want many famil­iar ele­ments in the movie as possible

What races will be rep­re­sented? Not very easy to answer con­sid­er­ing the time­line we’re talk­ing about, so they are not sure about if the For­saken have yet joined the Horde But not every­one can be in the spot­light in the first movie anyway

War­craft has a lot of strong char­ac­ters, would you con­sider going back to do another movie on Arthas? I would con­sider that, sure, but we haven’t talked about what other films might deal with. We have to get the first movie right first before you deal with franchises.

This is based on two or three major moments in the games, so it isn’t rad­i­cally apart from the con­ti­nu­ity, so it really holds together. We want it to taste like the World of War­craft world. but it’s also really fresh. I under­stand the fear that you don’t want us to screw up the story, but we will be respect­ful of the con­ti­nu­ity but will hold up as a killer 2 hour movie. It is a lit­tle mod­i­fied.
There’s so much in this world to deal with, so you use that as a jump­ing off point to tell a kick ass story. They want the play­ers to enjoy the movie expe­ri­ence, if they are too much a slave to the story that won’t be the case. They want to respect the world, but to trans­late it to the screeen and is great on film.

And here is an after-video from IGN:

Speak­ing at the Hol­ly­wood and Game sum­mit keynote, Thomas Tull (Leg­endary Pic­tures Chair­man) pro­vided some rest-bite, ensur­ing us that the movie will be dealt with as nec­es­sary. He begins,

“We’re doing World of War­craft, and mak­ing it into a movie. I have very strong feel­ings — from the movie side — that mak­ing movies based on games just because they sold well is a really bad idea. There’ve been some like that that weren’t up to snuff just out of the gate. It doesn’t mat­ter to us if it’s based on a graphic novel like [Frank Miller’s] 300, or a TV show – if there’s a great uni­verse and story, that’s what’s inter­est­ing to us.”

In the fol­low­ing  Ques­tion and Answer ses­sion Tull stated that Leg­endary and Bliz­zard are work­ing very closely together to get the sto­ry­line per­fect by pin­point­ing what makes up the essence of the War­craft universe:

“I think some of the stuff that makes a game trans­late well into a movie is a good story. If there’s a lore, if there’s a road and story and a world that’s been cre­ated, and char­ac­ters that are inter­est­ing in a way that’s more than just point and shoot. You have to look at it and not make a nov­elty out of it. Not just look at sales records. Bliz­zard plays a very impor­tant role in this process. If you’ve cre­ated a game, be it Halo, Gears Of War, or War­craft [each being trans­formed into a movie] — you came up with some­thing that’s com­pelling enough to res­onate with a huge num­ber of peo­ple. There has to be a trust, and you have to at some point hand over the baton to peo­ple who know how to make films.”

“We are work­ing very closely with the design­ers and writ­ers, and they’re very involved. I think on the big­ger [films] you have to have that. They’re sit­ting right there at the table with us as we develop the story and the script, and I think we’re nail­ing the story and what’s com­pelling about it.”

Via Gama­su­tra where you can find more news from the Hol­ly­wood and Game summit.

Bliz­zard is hot right now, what with Star­craft 2 on its way and WoW con­tin­u­ing to dom­i­nate. Now we are hear­ing rumors of a Dia­blo adap­ta­tion for the big screen. These rumors came about when “Dia­blo” was spot­ted in the “In Devel­op­ment” sec­tion of Leg­endary Pic­tures’ web­site. This notice has since been removed and Bliz­zard have been char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally silent on the whole mat­ter. Com­ing from an offi­cial source this is hard to clas­sify as merely rumor, though lack of an offi­cial press state­ment and the notice’s removal does war­rant this labelling.

Nobody really knows what’s going on at the moment — except that the War­craft Motion Pic­ture is still in development.

We’ll keep you tuned should any devel­op­ments arise.

… and they asked him a lit­tle bit about the World of War­craft movie. Itzik Ben Bas­sat is the Vice Pres­i­dent of devel­op­ment and he says these few words:

There’s a World of War­craft Movie in the works, do you expect that to enjoy sim­i­lar suc­cess?
We’ve been work­ing on that movie for years! If peo­ple only knew how many years we put in to clos­ing this movie deal. We’re very happy with our progress though, it was really dif­fi­cult for us as a com­pany to find some we trusted to work with. With Leg­endary, well, they did Bat­man Returns and the new Super­man so we knew that was a com­pany we wanted to work with. Bring­ing War­craft to the movies is the next step for us, we want to let peo­ple bring World of War­craft into other aspects of their lives. After all, we’re com­pet­ing for people’s enter­tain­ment time, whether it’s lis­ten­ing to music watch­ing TV or going to the cin­ema. Our goal is to pro­vide the best enter­tain­ment out there.

Any news on when we can expect to see the film?
Hol­ly­wood has it’s own pace but we’re work­ing as hard as we can to push it forwards.

Check Empire for the full text.

An undis­closed source at a news site called “The Instance” claims to have insider infor­ma­tion with regards to the War­craft movie adap­ta­tion. At such an early stage any infor­ma­tion like this is most cer­tainly false and this has been clas­si­fied as a rumor — which is giv­ing this far too much credit. Im not even sure actors are involved in the process yet — firstly a direc­tor needs to be named.

If you see this infor­ma­tion repeated any­where, know that this was an April Fool’s joke/prank. Peo­ple have been talk­ing about these details as if they were facts and I am dis­pelling them now.

“I’m a per­sonal assis­tant for a very well-known actor, and I’ve just handed him a com­plete script treat­ment for the new War­craft movie. It’s going to be called “War­craft: The Fall of Quel’Thalas”, and it looks like it may be the first of a pro­posed tril­ogy, with a sec­ond part called “The Cav­erns Of Time” and the final install­ment called “The Bat­tle Of Mount Hyjal”.”

With the suc­cess of LotR though, every­thing seems des­tined for a tril­ogy these days.

Come May 8th 2006 Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment made an announce­ment that their War­craft franchise/universe would be adapted into a sil­ver screen fea­ture length movie. Leg­endary Pic­tures, a rel­a­tively new pro­duc­tion com­pany behind Super­man Returns and Bat­man Begins, are to develop the live action film with dis­tri­b­u­tion likely falling  to Warner Broth­ers as part of an exist­ing agreement.

Paul Sams, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer for Bliz­zard had this to say, “We searched for a very long time to find the right stu­dio for devel­op­ing a movie based on one of our game uni­verses. Many com­pa­nies approached us in the past, but it wasn’t until we met with Leg­endary Pic­tures that we felt we’d found the per­fect part­ner. They clearly share our high stan­dards for cre­ative devel­op­ment, and because they under­stand the vision that we’ve always strived for with our War­craft games, we feel there isn’t a bet­ter stu­dio out there for bring­ing the War­craft story to film.”

Whilst Thomas Tul, CEO of leg­endary pic­tures stated,  “One of our goals at Leg­endary Pic­tures has been to bring heroic sto­ries to life in ground­break­ing ways, and it’s inspir­ing to work with a com­pany such as Bliz­zard that takes that approach with each of its prod­ucts. The War­craft uni­verse is pos­sessed of such a rich mythol­ogy and, as such, serves as an ideal plat­form as we go about trans­lat­ing that uni­verse into what we intend to be a major event film.”

With regards to the adap­ta­tion, Leg­endary Pic­tures’ Jon Jashni said, “We are intend­ing to approach this as we would the adap­ta­tion of a best-selling novel: respect the essence of all that it is but also build upon that fer­tile base while trans­lat­ing it into a new medium.”

The offi­cial announce­ment can be found here.

As of the moment IMDB has penned a 2008 release date which is of course sub­ject to change.