For a while there I really thought there was a betterment in the standards of the movie industry. Obviously there were always exceptions, but the last couple years I've been an advocate for the path Hollywood was taking, producing some pretty good movies on high budgets with big name actors. I mentioned it in the bit about Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are. Awesome concept. Then the pretty cool direction the sub-genre of comic epics.
But I have officially been proved wrong. Perhaps it's a tanked economy. Perhaps it's desperation. Who knows. The man who brought us the incredibly revered Drag Me To Hell, Sam Raimi (also responsible for the Spiderman movies, which are a little cheesy compared to the better of that genre) is about to make a World of Warcraft Movie. Here's a little bit of his work:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-REviL75zg]
Yes, this is only a taste of some of the theme's you'll get in the WOW movie. I particularly like the seance. And that old woman's teeth. Maybe there will be some awesome ghouls in this or some giant, badass, green hairy piglike creatures.
I'm going to say right now, too, that I have no knowledge of whether Warcraft is good game or not. I've never played it.
I did play Zelda, which was awesome. I mean I spent hours coming home and fulfilling the incredible, action-packed quest of Link. But in no way shape or form would I want to see a movie made out of that.
All this comes in the wake of an announcement of a movie based on Asteroids, which is only cool cause it was before the days of video game plot. Great movie material. A NYT column takes a pretty decent stab at what that will be like.
So all of this is not necessarily to chastise the industry as a whole, because decent movies are still being put out--hence the other posts I had on this subject. But it's almost an insult to the movie going population to be offered famous video games repackaged into a two-hour excuse to blow some stuff up.
The only thing that would redeem this is if they can pull it off with a kind of postmodern feel to it, a fresh perspective on it that takes itself lightly. But then the people who are absolutely in love with WOW will uproar. Sorry, Mr. Raimi, but you might have picked a doomed project.