While the video game market is still enduring a lot of ups and downs, quite a few video game movies have been put into development, including Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, and Deus Ex, while Need For Speed will be hitting theaters next year.
With today’s technology, games look more cinematic than ever, and perhaps a truly great video game movie will finally be just around the corner.
In addition to the Christopher Nolan Batmans, and the upcoming Man of Steel, Legendary Pictures is also producing the World of Warcraft movie, which Sam Raimi was attached to at one point, but is now going to be directed by Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code). Along with Halo, World of Warcraft is probably the biggest video game franchise that could make a major blockbuster movie.
Now Collider spoke to Thomas Tull, the CEO of Legendary, and asked the question we all want to know. Can we ever make a great video game movie? “I think first of all [you have] to lose the fact that it’s a video game movie and just concentrate on do you have a story that’s worth telling?,” Tull replied. “If you look back at the 80s, comic book moviews were not anywhere near what they are today. They weren’t given the resources and you didn’t have the level of directors that you have today working on these things.”
Tull added that with games today, “it’s just become much more sophisticated storytelling…[it’s] hard to do a movie off of Pong, but when you have stuff like Mass Effect, you have things like Warcraft, that’s what we’re attracted to.” Tull said that Legendary took its time with Warcraft, because if you’re just trying to make a buck off the game’s franchise, “that’s a death trap, the surest way to make a crap movie.”
The fact that good directors like Raimi and Jones have been considered to make World of Warcraft shows that at the very least Legendary’s taking a good first step forward instead of hiring a hack. Tull predicts that Duncan “is going to break [the] mold because it’s going to have the resources, the talent around it…it will speak for itself when it comes out.”
So could we potentially have a World of Warcraft movie within the next several years? Maybe even by 2015 when we’ll also have Star Wars and The Avengers 2? Well, that’s still a ways away, but Tull promises we’ll hear more news on the Warcraft script and release date soon. We’ll certainly be watching, waiting and hoping for the best with this one, stay tuned…
