The World of Warcraft film adaptation is making headway! Rumor has it Paula Patton, Colin Farrell, Anton Yelchin, and Paul Dano have all been offered roles and are currently in negotiations with Legendary Pictures and Atlas Entertainment. Colin Farrell is purportedly “50/50” on signing up. Patton was offered the lead Warcraft casting role.
Sam Raimi was on board to direct the adaptation when it was announced back in 2006, but dropped out last year. He was replaced by Duncan Jones (Source Code, Moon).
No word yet on details or the plot, but Charles Leavitt’s (K-Pax, Blood Diamond) script is based on the hugely popular “Warcraft” video game franchise by Chris Metzen. For those of you unfamiliar with online gaming, World of Warcraft is a multi-player, role-playing fantasy game which takes place on Azeroth, a planet abound with kingdoms and islands and continents featuring traditional fantasy characters such as elves, dwarfs, gnomes, and trolls.
An immense franchise, Warcraft is owned and operated by Blizzard Entertainment and has resulted in tons of other media such as card games, merchandise, comics and novels. Thus it comes as no surprise that a movie is in the works. Production is set to begin in January.
I can’t possibly imagine what this script is like. If we’ve learned anything from the recent barrage of video-game adaptations in the last ten years, making a video-game movie is hard work. Super Mario Bros. (1993) was the first example of what happens when a studio invests tons of money into a video-game adaptation assuming everyone will see it simply because the game is popular with the kiddies. That movie was one of the biggest disasters in cinematic history, but it had a terrible script that made virtually no sense. More recently, we got Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Max Payne… the less I say about them the better.
That being said, Warcraft has a fighting chance because 1) it taps into the recent trend of fantasy-themed media (Game of Thrones) and 2) Leavitt appears competent enough to at least construct a coherent narrative. As for director Duncan Jones, both Moon and Source Code (although not great films) showed lots of promise and demonstrated a unique vision. So I’m excited to see what he can do next.
Colin Farrell is a seriously underrated actor who made a terrible decision with Total Recall, his last big-budget action film. He should be lauded for managing to remain hyper-famous while still taking on low-budget indie roles. Will this be the actor’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise? I certainly hope not.
SOURCE: Latino Review