The German director Uwe Boll wanted to secure the rights to the Warcraft film. The rejection came promptly at that time – as they already knew him.
Even though the release of the film “Warcraft – The Beginning” was almost 8 years ago, fans still often talk about the film. Many hope for a sequel or hope that Blizzard will highlight another part of the story of World of Warcraft – such as the rise of the Lich King.
But even though the film was economically “okay” primarily due to its success in China and most were at least satisfied (if not thrilled) with the adaptation: it could have been much worse.
For many do not know: Uwe Boll also wanted to be the director of the Warcraft film. And we should all be glad that we escaped that timeline.
Who is Uwe Boll? Uwe Boll is a German director who has a bad reputation among gamers – mainly because of his video game adaptations, which not only often deviate significantly from the source material but are also objectively just not good films. His works include:
- Postal
- King’s Swords – Dungeon Siege
- BloodRayne
- Alone in the Dark
- Far Cry
For several of his films, he was nominated for the negative award “Golden Raspberries”, and in some cases, he even won them (e.g., for Postal and Dungeon Siege).
What did Uwe Boll say? In a conversation with MTV News, Uwe Boll revealed at that time that he had also sought the rights to the Warcraft film. However, his idea of adaptation would probably have looked very different – also because he does not think highly of WoW fans or gamers in general:
You try to do that, to satisfy the fans, but on the other hand, you have these hardcore gamers, who live in their own world. You can’t meet their ideas of a film based on a video game, that’s impossible. And to be honest, the real gamers are anyway the typical download guys, right? They don’t pay for movies because they just download the movies illegally. So why should I satisfy those people? I need the normal viewers.
Blizzard’s response, however, was quite clear:
I contacted Paul Sams from Blizzard and he said: ‘We will not sell the film rights to you… especially not to you.’ […] Because it is such a major success as an online game, maybe a bad film would have destroyed that ongoing income that [Blizzard] earns from it.
Even though the Warcraft film probably did not fully meet the expectations of many fans and a sequel seems unlikely – maybe we should be grateful for what we got.
It could have turned out much worse.
For those who haven’t seen the film yet, you can currently watch it on Netflix. Otherwise, we have many other exciting movie and series recommendations on MeinMMO.
