There’s not a large part of me that wants to see the above image being brought to screen, but it’s hard to ignore millions of fans of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. Blizzard Entertainment has been working with Legendary Entertainment on a feature film adaptation for some time, but we got the news during Comic-Con that they lost their potential director Sam Raimi. He remarked they had to move on since he was doing Oz the Great and Powerful and they seem to have done just that.
Variety reports they’ve brought on Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond, K-PAX and the upcoming The Seventh Son) to script the fantasy movie. They also already have plans to kick off a new director search by the end of the year. Activision Blizzard head Bobby Kotick, who had a cameo in last year’s Moneyball, said the very general statement of, “if it’s important to Blizzard, it’s important to me. They’re very excited about having a ‘World of Warcraft’ film. They’ve been very careful and thoughtful about the development process.”
I’m curious how expansive the creative forces behind this one want to get. Part of the presumed joy of playing the game (something I’ve never done for fear of addiction) is the ability to go a million different directions a million different ways. Film is of course a singular experience, so I’d have to imagine the game studio would want the perfect take before moving ahead with any sort of deal. A release date could be as soon as 2014, but I’d expect we won’t see this one for some time.
What do you want to see in a WoW feature film? Who should direct?