With World Of Warcraft showing incredible longevity among computer game fans, it’s almost surprsing there hasn’t been more talk about turning it into a movie, probably because it’d cost an awful lot of money to bring the fantasy realm to the big screen. However now it’s being reported that Spider-man and Drag Me To Hell director Sam Raimi has signed up to helm a live action adapatation of the role-playing game.
Also involved is Dark Knight producer Charles Roven, who’ll be overseeing the film for Legendary Picture, the game’s publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, and Warner Bros. The current plan is for Raimi to supevise development of the Warcarft movie while he works on Spider-man 4, and then shoot the film once he’s completed the comic book seuqel.
Warcraft, which centres around an epic fantasy conflicted between the Horder and the Alliance, has been around since 1994, and has seen tremendous continued popularity, with the most recent update, ‘Wrath Of The Lich King’, selling four million copies in its first month.
Warner is planning to mount to film as a major blockbuster, with the studio’s president saying that it’s “emblematic of the kind of branded, event films for which our studio is best known.”
While fantasy films are rarely any good, most of them coming across as too silly for words, the involvement of Raimi gives us hope that World Of Warcraft could actually be turned into a great film, and not suffer the same filmic fate as the likes of Dungeons & Dragons and Dungeon Siege.