There has never been a good movie based on a video game. Think about that for a second. For twenty years, Hollywood has been trying to adapt video games to film; Wikipedia lists 29 adaptations made in that time. They've never successfully made a good one. And so I am highly nervous about the news that Duncan Jones is going to make a World of Warcraft movie. Jones's first movie, Moon, was a home run. His second movie, Source Code, was not very good at all, although it was at least ambitious and demonstrated his craftsmanship. But this is going to require a lot of work. I mean, look at Badass Digest's description of Warcraft:
World of Warcraft is just the latest iteration of the Warcraft universe, which sees a Tolkien-esque fantasy land known as Azeroth divided in a massive, ongoing war between the Alliance and the Horde. The Alliance is a group of all the boring fantasy races - humans, gnomes, dwarves, lame elves - while the Horde is made up of totally awesome races like Orcs, Trolls, Undead, Blood Elves and minotaur-like Tauren*. Over the years the ever-expanding universe has grown to include multiple planes of existence, outer space, time travel, werewolves, a race of kung-fu pandas and more. Warcraft offers an embarrassment of fantasy riches; it's like every fantasy concept thrown into a blender.
Now, I expect that Jones will manage to keep the story fairly simple, since this is the first Warcraft movie. And you can't doubt Jones's dedication to WarcraftâBadass Digest discovered a previous interview of Jones raving about the idea of a Warcraft movie back in 2010. So there's a possibility that this might work out. But Jones is battling against twenty years of tradition, here, and there's a distinct possibility that his third movie could be his first truly bad movie.
