With two critically acclaimed, small-to-medium budget sci-fi movies under his belt, Duncan Jones (Source Code, Moon) is seemingly headed to the big-time with the announcement that he will be directing Legendary Pictures’ big-budget live-action adaptation of the popular MMO game World of Warcraft.
Confirming a Hollywood Reporter story from earlier that day, Jones took to Twitter Wednesday evening to write “So the gauntlet was thrown down ages ago: Can you make a proper MOVIE of a video game. I’ve always said it’s possible. Got to DO it now! ;)” (Blizzard Entertainment also confirmed the news via its official World of Warcraft Twitter account.)
Jones’ tweet points to a hurdle that the WoW movie will have to overcome: The fact that movies based on videogames tend to be somewhat… well, lousy.
From 1993′s Super Mario Bros through last year’s Resident Evil: Retribution, the genre consistently struggles with poor reviews and a box office appeal that seems cult at best, perhaps because it’s difficult to convince fans of the games that the passive experience of watching the stories unfold is more fun than actively participating in them.
Because of the sprawling, massively de-centralized nature of MMOs as a genre, any World of Warcraft movie faces an additional problem: There’s no central narrative for the movie to adapt. A script for the movie already exists, written by Charles Leavitt, best-known for his 2006 Blood Diamond script and 2001 adaptation of Gene Brewer’s novel K-Pax, but Legendary has so far kept plot details under wraps.
Jones’s involvement kickstarts the project, which has been in various stages of development since 2006. (At one point, Sam Raimi was heading up the adaptation, although he left to direct the soon-to-be-released Oz: The Great and Powerful.) Now that Jones is onboard, Legendary reportedly wants production on the movie to begin in the fall of this year for a 2015 release, which would put it right at the center of an already-crowded year for genre movies; in addition to J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars debut, 2015 is also the scheduled year of release for Avengers 2 and Warner Bros’ mooted Justice League movie, based upon the DC Comics heroes.
The WoW movie is expected to have a budget upwards of $100 million — for some context, the budget for the first Lord of the Rings movie, The Fellowship of the Ring, was $93 million – by far the biggest project that Jones has tackled to date. His last movie, 2011′s Source Code, had a budget of $32 million according to Box Office Mojo, while his debut, Moon, cost just around $1 million. Given what he has been able to do with less money before — and his apparent awareness of the problems inherent with the videogame movie genre — the prospect of Jones having over $100 million to play with and spend wisely is an exciting one indeed, even for those who have never been tempted to play the online fantasy game.
<i>World of Warcraft</i> Movie Coming From <i>Source Code</i> Director Duncan Jones
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<i>World of Warcraft</i> Movie Coming From <i>Source Code</i> Director Duncan Jones
