News of a World of Warcraft film have been quiet, but there has been some movement in that camp including a plot direction and title!
They have established a release date of 2011, but that’s not all folks. Originally holding a one word title, “Warcraft,” the guys over at Legendary Pictures and Blizzard Entertainment have changed the name to: Warcraft : Rise of the Lich King.
The reason why the title change is important is because it draws the connection to the novels written by Christie Golden which refer to the Warcraft III games and the general lore of Azeroth. These rely heavily on the presence of Arthas, who is a very prominent character in the world of Warcraft. People usually peg Arthas as the Darth Vader type in-game, but the books offer much more of an in-depth glimpse into the life of his undiscovered persona.
Originally it was said that a World of Warcraft movie was not going to be cannon with the games, but be a completely original story.
The epic story laid out in Warcraft 3 is magnificent, and I am happy to hear they will be moving forward with a canon based story. The events laid out in Warcraft3 and its expansion the Frozen Throne lead up to the insanely popular MMO game, which would make sense that they would flesh out that story instead of starting with something unrelated in the same world.
Now I am itching to play again.
you are an idiot and you did not understand anything from anything
WHY IN THE WORLD most of you HATE Arthas?
Arthas is the “good” guy! He did what he HAD to do!
He got screwed by his superiors, they told him to let go the GENOCIDE of his people, but he couldn’t! & eventually he got his Vendetta! Then he realised that his superiors are not worthy to be SUPERIORS! So he eliminated them ALL! Well, almost all..
Arthas is the TRUE hero of WARCRAFT III..& a movie about him will KICKASS!
I look forward to it…I am sure you will ALL LOVE the movie..
til 2011 ;)
Well all I hope for is that they choose a good story no matter if it involves Arthas or whoever. Hell I think if they made it about Thrall that would be friggin sweet. I know hollywood will not be able to please the hardcore fans and I believe that their intentions is to reach to a larger audience (other than the 11 million or so people playing WOW). Which in turn makes them more money. All these details could be false or could be true. All I want is that they do a good job. Have some awesome effects and war scenes. And incredible creature effects and not rely so much on CGI. Now I wonder…will they use little people to play gnomes and dwarfs? Or kids and actors like they did for the Lord of the Rings films?
Damn…i Just unistalled the game to stop playing and suddenly i feel like playing…
Well “games to movies” fails almost every time, lets hope it doesn’t happen on this one…
This is a bogus rumor. Blizzard has specifically said that the movie wasn’t about Arthus or the Lich King story. This is just somebody posting something on IMDB because IMDB is user generated content with little to no fact-checking just like Wikipedia.
I think tomorrow I’ll go change the subtitle to “Revenge of Hogger” and see how long it takes for it to make the rounds on the internet.
Blizzard announces things when they’re true. If they’ve subtitled the movie and they’re ready for it to be common knowledge, they’ll have a big announcement and a press release. I’ll probably get an email from them and there will be shiny graphics and a new website for it.
These are the people that kept Starcraft 2 a secret for years. They don’t have leaks that they don’t want.
Details of the WoW Expansion Cataclysm were out months before Blizzcon as “unconfirmed” as well. That turned out to be accurate.
And Starcraft 2 wasn’t a secret. When they hired developers for a new game the internet was immediately buzzing with news of “World of Starcraft” which was quickly debunked as the Starcraft 2 team. The official announcement didnt come until a year later.
As with anything on this site, it could be false. But there is no reason right now to suggest it isnt.
I don’t believe for a second that Blizzard cared about the information for Cataclysm being released ahead of time. As for Starcraft 2, there were rumors of it every time they hired anybody for ten years, so it’s no doubt there were rumors of it right around the time it was starting development. As an avid player of Starcraft, I watched those rumors and they were bound to be right eventually.
There is a huge reason to suggest that it’s false, and that’s the fact that IMDB is user generated content, as I said. They’ve already listed casting rumors on the film that have turned out not to be true. I’ve watched them list projects in development before, and seen how one person saying one random thing on the internet somewhere about “wouldn’t it be cool if…” turns into an “official” IMDB page.
They aren’t a reliable source. So everyone reporting this as anything more than rumor and fan speculation isn’t practicing good reporting skills.
When people started talking about Miley Cyrus in the new Batman, people reported it on blogs as “some crazy fan rumor, but who knows.”
This news has been met with, “They’ve changed the title here’s the official storyline it’s from this book here’s all the details!!” instead of anyone pointing out the fact that it’s coming from a site that can’t be trusted.
Considering what John had to do to get The Anniversary listed (and that was a real movie with real stars in it) I doubt that anyone in the comment section fabricated rumours would end up being a IMDB page.
Listing a brand new film is entirely different from changing the listing of an existing film or actor. Listing a new film involves requirements from IMDB considering how “important” the film is basically, if it’s been shown at festivals, etc. But once it’s up there, it’s extremely simple for any user to change the information.
I’ve changed listings plenty of times on IMDB, and I’ve heard several actors give interviews about how easy it is for people to put false information on their biographies that then take on a life of their own long after they’ve convinced IMDB to take it down. One actress even pointed out that she repeatedly took a piece of incorrect biography off her own page repeatedly and someone kept adding it back.
Once a film is listed, there’s a link over to the left where anybody with an IMDB account can click on it and change any information they want.
The information that I changed was to take down blatantly false information that I could easily refute with cited sources, but there it was, black and white on the page like it was the truth. Fabricated rumors end up on IMDB all the time. One of the ones I corrected was for the first Transformers movie, so you can’t say it doesn’t happen or that it doesn’t happen to big films.
Maybe tomorrow Blizzard will make an official announcement, but nothing changes the fact that IMDB is not a reliable source and shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s an integrity issue.
I would take this with a grain of salt. The original source is IMDB. There has been no official announcement made by either Blizzard or Legendary Pictures.
Just sayin…
My interests are Games (in this case, specifically WoW) and Movies. When these interests intersect, I am very passionate about it and will make my opinion known. I am doing so in what I thought was a relatively polite, non-inflammatory manner.
I don’t want to accept it for what it is if it’s the third iteration of the same story about a character who, by the time the movie will be released, is old news.
It’s unfair of you to ask a fanboy to settle for something sub par when he believes that it could be done much better.
And Lord of the Rings was old news by the time they got around to the film. Man did that ever suck.
God I wish they had ditched that whole thing and come up with something new. Clearly the previous iterations of the characters in that movie were a hindrance to its boxoffice and Oscar chances.
Seriously.
Thank you Rodney! Exactly!
LotR wasn’t old news when they made the films, it was a classic. The films are based off of books that are over 50 years old. WoW is based off of a constantly evolving MMO where the game world can change drastically every few months or so. The only thing that LotR and WoW have in common are that they are movies based off of an intellectual property.
And both properties have hardcore fan followings who are more than eager to see their beloved tales set to the big screen.
Arthus story is a great one, and it will appeal to the die hard fans of the series, as well as fantasy viewers alike.
Wow is not based off a constantly evolving MMO, it IS an MMO. World of Warcraft is based off the classic RTS game series that started 15 years ago.
The movie will be based on the story played out in Warcraft 3, which then leads into WoW.
Did you really say “WoW is based off a constantly evolving MMO”
Firstly, Don’t refer to Warcraft as WoW. It’s not the same. World of Warcraft is the MMO and can’t be based off itself.
Secondly, This isn’t based off of World of Warcraft. It is based off of Warcraft. Not the MMO. The lore. That means the very first RTS, the second, third, comics, novels, and yes probably the MMO too. All of those combined make up the “lore”. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if they kept the movie and MMO separate in a way. Because while the MMO is ever changing and adding. They probably wouldn’t want something to contradict something else with the movie.
About them retelling the story of Arthus. I think it’s a good Idea. It a great story and it’s a story a lot of us know. So to open with something familiar is a smart movie. While you may be sick of it because you just relived it in WoW. I for one would like to see a movie based on it. To me it’s one of the more interesting stories and it leads us into some other interesting stories. Since I doubt this will be the last of the Warcraft films. The Rise of the Lich King is a good starting point.
I really hope this is heavily influenced by LOTR’s too. But still keeping it original. Since LOTR’s was suspenseful and dramatic but still had its comedy.
Okay, the movie is W:RotLK. I have basically been calling it WoW: The Movie which is my mistake.
From what I gather, this is supposed to be based off the book based off of WC3. It would make more sense, because the book Arthas:RotLK tells us about Arthas before the events of WC3, and ending with Arthas becoming the Lich King.
I understand the appeal of the story. I just think it has been told too many times already and I don’t think that the time it will take to release it is sufficient enough for the material to be “fresh” again.
If the movie is great, it’s great and I will forever consider it a blessing that a video game movie turned out right. I just think that while we’re playing a game where a giant freaking dragon is our end goal, it would be cool to have a movie about that huge freaking dragon. Not the guy we defeated last year.
you say Arthus’s story has been told too often, and would be a bad idea for a movie
my arguement against that is simple
Passion of Christ
-a story told way too much
-hardcore fanboys that know the story but still went to see it
just look at the money it made
reason why they are using Arthus’s story is for the same reason.
since people have a idea what its about, they will go see it and hence, blizz makes money
Normally, I hate video game movies, but seeing as World of Warcraft already sucks as a video game, I don’t think a movie would really help or hurt the already shitty series.
There are something like 11 million people in the world who disagree.
I don’t like World of WarCraft, but I do love WarCraft and WarCraft 2 (Never played 3, so I can’t comment), and I love the lore and stories of the series, so I’m all behind a movie.
I hate to say it Andrew, but you are the opposite of right.
You cannot argue with the insane inbalance of the video game market where World of Warcraft has more monthly subscribers than all other MMOs on the market combined.
The game has a very indepth lore, storyline and a lot of heart. I cant wait to see it played out on the big screen.
And I am certain that 11million regular players in the world will all be seeing this at some point… if they can get away from the game long enough. Maybe when the server is on maintenance ?
They should get Uwe Boll to direct.
If warcraft comes on summer 2011 i think it might bomb at the box office.I mean there are alot of comic book movies coming in 2011.spiderman 4,thor,captain america,green lantern,transformers 3…
That makes no sense whatsoever.
You realize world of warcraft isn’t a comic right?
But it is a comic, and a manga, and a novel series as well as a video game RTS and MMO.
It is all those things.
**Spoilers farther down, about the book**
No, no, no, no, no, no, hell effing NO!
Okay, my first instinct is to call shinanigans on this one. Rodney, it’s not that I don’t trust your sources, it’s just that this is my gut reaction.
Secondly, the Lich King has had too much focus recently. Warcraft 3, of course, revolves around this guy. The expansion has revolved around this guy and they are soon going to release patch 3.3 which will contain (I assume) the expansion’s last raid with Arthas as the final boss of the raid. The story of his downfall has been told over and over, and we’re about to kick his ass anyway.
Also, there has been Christie Golden’s book which I personally disliked because Arthas wouldn’t shut the hell up about his dead horse while it told the same story I already played in WC3 and learn about extensivle in the expansion. The book turned Arthas into a whiny pussy.
I know Arthas is cool, but I’m sick of him. The next expansion, Cataclysm, has been announced where a gargantuan dragon literally rips the world of Azeroth a new asshole. Can we focus on that now please?
But this story is about his RISE, not his downfall.
I would suspect that the film would climax with Arthus becoming the conflicted Lich King.
To clarify: When Arthas becomes the Lich King, Arthas is gone. Dead. Nothing Left. At all. Period. Thus = Arthas’ Downfall = Rise of the Lich King.
This story is common knowledge to the majority of WoW players, and we (players) are about to defeat him anyway. His story is coming to a close for now, to make way for Deathwing blowing up the world. No one believes that Arthas will completly die (and we know that the story of his evil, corrupting sword Frostmorne will continue), but WoW is moving on to a new villian right now.
That is to say, the story of how Arthas/Lich King comes to power is the one constantly retold.
He says “now we are one”, not “now we are only Ner’zhul”.
You can argue that his humanity is gone, but Arthas is definitely there.
Arthas + Ner’zhul = Lich King
@ Victor: Point taken. But the “good” parts of Arthas are gone, leaving no hope for redemption. I mean, he destroyed his heart. There’s not much left after that.
@ Ty: Yup.
I don’t play WarCraft, I don’t know the story. It sounds interesting and I would probably go watch this movie. I don’t think they are making this for just Warcraft fans, but probably want to reach a broad range of people who are unfamiliar with this story. It’s old to you, But it’s new to me and many others.
IMHO, why make a Warcraft movie for the fans, but then tell a story that most fans already know?
Warcraft Lore has so much history and content that I generally don’t bother keeping it all straight. Arthas’ story, on the other hand, is so integral to the world that Blizzard makes sure that the players know what happened.
I understand that the story of Arthas and the Lich King may be new to you, but then you’re not really the target audience. Why not pick a less familiar story and give the WoW players something fresh as well?
Just because Arthas’s story works so well. And it works so well because we’ve actually been there, we played with him through the stages of his life. And everyone wants to know what happens next, or at least have a good quality CGI of what already happened.
Still, I agree that they should have focused on a less familiar story like Ner’zhul’s, rather than Arthas’s.
I think the reason they are showing this is BECAUSE Warcraft players are so familiar with this story. When I was younger, Mortal Kombat was a shit movie, but damn if I didn’t get excited when I saw Goro and Kano. When I first saw Gambit in the Wolverine movie, I was pumped despite the fact that I hate the actor playing him and the movie was terrible. It was fucking Gambit! In a movie! That’s why they are doing this. The fact that people are familiar with this story is exactly the reason Warcraft will be excited when they see it. You may not realize that now, but who’s to say when you’re sitting in that Theater and seeing Arthas that you don’t get that nostalgic, child like feeling.