Will World Of Warcraft Be The First Good Video Game Movie?

 

It’s no secret that movies based on video games typically aren’t very good. There are exceptions to the rule, of course — the Resident Evil movies have their fans, and I’m fond of Silent Hill — but overall, there isn’t a single video game movie that the masses can agree upon as a decisive success.

But perhaps that could change with Sam Raimi’s upcoming World of Warcraft adaptation — director Duncan Jones seems to think so, at least, telling Badass Digest that the MMORPG-based fantasy movie has the best shot at pushing the video game movie genre’s reputation in the right direction.

“I’m hugely jealous of Sam Raimi,” said the Moon director. “I really believe World of Warcraft could be the launch of computer games as good films. And from the little I’ve read of interviews with him the way he’s approaching it makes so much sense. It’s what I was talking about – it’s not worrying about how the game plays, it’s about creating the world of the game and investing the audience in that world.”

Jones added some more thoughts on video game movies, citing various directors’ lack of enthusiasm for source material as a major reason for the genre’s overall failure: “I’m very cynical of the number of directors who say they’re actual gamers. When you meet a lot of them in person, they’re not really gamers. I’m a real gamer and I think there are less real gamers involved in directing only because you have to spend so much time making films that there’s no time to be a hardcore gamer. I’m just slightly insane and I stay up all night playing games. In the day I’m working and at night I play games.”

(For what it’s worth, if Jones, a self-described hardcore gamer, wants to make a video game movie, someone in Hollywood really needs to make that happen. A Jones-directed Mass Effect would be absolutely off the charts.)