It’s been a few years since a movie based on the still-insanely-popular WORLD OF WARCRAFT videogame was first announced, but it hasn’t yet escaped the clutches of the Lich King.
One guy who wants Blizzard’s massively multiplayer online world to come alive is MOON and SOURCE CODE director Duncan Jones.
Jones is a hardcore gamer (and questions other directors who make that claim), and despite the number of misfires that make it to screen, he remains optimistic that WoW or another could be the right one: “I definitely think there is an intangible aspect of video games in the interactivity that a film is never going to capture,” he tells Badass Digest. “But that is not what a game adaptation needs to be. 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. If you’re going to make a film of a game it’s got to be about the essence of why you, the audience, care what’s going on. There are certain games where that will work, and there are certain games where it doesn’t.”
“I’m hugely jealous of Sam Raimi,” he says in reference to the EVIL DEAD/SPIDER-MAN filmmaker who’s currently working on the adaptation. “I really believe WORLD OF WARCRAFT could be the launch of computer games as good films. And 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.”
Maybe if Raimi gets caught up with OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL or some other project, he’ll let someone like Jones bring the Horde raiding parties and Blood Elf babes to the big screen…