Thank Goodness For That
Posted by Stropp on April 19, 2008From the MTV Movies Blog and Filmonic comes the news that the director of the worlds worst game to movie adaptations has approached Blizzard to bring World of Warcraft to the big screen.
Uwe Boll (IMDB reference) has directed such shockers as Bloodrayne, Bloodrayne II: Deliverance, and Alone in the Dark. It’s also been reported that his productions are designed to use as some sort of German tax write off — apparently loss making movies earn some sort of large tax credit. Make a flop and earn a lot of money. It doesn’t sound like that’s the sort of situation any game developer would like to see their IP in.
It seems Blizzard feels the same way. Uwe Boll according to the MTV Movies report approached Blizzard’s Paul Sams to buy the movie rights to World of Warcraft and was soundly rebuffed.
Sams, reportedly (by Boll himself) said:
‘We will not sell the movie rights, not to you…especially not to you,’” Boll revealed. “Because it’s such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income, what the company has with it.”
Thank goodness that the folks at Blizzard have the sense not to hand their valuable property over to someone who would only destroy it on screen. The rumor according to Filmonic is that Blizzard is interested in making a World of Warcraft Movie – I’ve heard the same rumors — but that they are highly invested in getting a movie of the quality of The Lord of the Rings.
I’m still burned about what Hollywood did to the Doom movie. (That wasn’t Boll.) Getting rid of the decent into Hell aspect and turning the whole scenario into a biohazard gone wrong cliche. I still can’t believe the Id Software guys let that happen.
Hollywood unfortunately doesn’t have all that good a track record with turning game properties into movies, something that was also the case with comic book movies up until a few years ago. Fortunately those have improved immensely. I wonder how long it will be before game movies catch up in quality.
Let’s have a little fun now. I’ve put a post up on the forums about what you’d like to see in a hypothetical World of Warcraft movie. Do some brainstorming, share your celluloid fantasies and who knows, you might end up with a career in the movies.
Popularity: 3%
Whew! Disaster averted. Uwe Boll could ruin anything. The Dungeon Siege movie was so bad that it wasn’t even funny … or anything. Just really REALLY bad. And I *liked* that game, I have to say. It deserved something better than it got.
As for the WoW movie, I am not sure about topic material, but I sure liked the style of the original WoW trailer… the dwarf with his bear heading toward Ironforge, etc. I’d like to see a cgi adaptation of a WoW story with that level of quality. Somehow I think it fits the game better anyway. Any attempt to do a “live action” adaptation is going to be a disappointment, I think. Just my opinion, though.
Never saw the DS movie but played a bit of the 1st game.I’ve seen both Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne though, bad movies but still nowhere near as bad as that John Travolta film, Battlefield Earth — it ranks as my worst movie of all time.
Since the original story came out, I’ve read a few comments that people reckon Blizzard should do the movie themselves in the style of the trailer. I’m not sure, a movie is a heck of a lot more work than that and relies on a well developed story not on cinematography.
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