Blizzard Veto Power Kills Raimi's Warcraft Movie

[Karloff]

Blizzard Veto Power Kills Raimi's Warcraft Movie

Sam Raimi of Evil Dead fame tells how his World of Warcraft movie pitch went south.

"So I read a screenplay they had that was written by the guys at [World of Warcraft developer] Blizzard [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/93330-Sam-Raimi-Set-to-Direct-Warcraft-Movie]," says Raimi, "and it didn't quite work for me." Raimi wanted to revamp the Warcraft screenplay into something more in tune with his personal aesthetic, and since production company Legendary was on board with that, he and scriptwriter Robert Rodat got to work. Nine months later, the man who made Evil Dead and Spider Man suddenly realizes, to his horror, that Blizzard retains veto power over any script changes. Blizzard hadn't explicitly given its OK to Raimi's story adjustments - even though Blizzard knew about them, since Raimi had pitched to Blizzard after Legendary said OK - citing unspecified reservations. That was the rock on which Raimi foundered.

"Those reservations were their way of saying, 'We don't approve this story, and we want to go a different way,'" Raimi says, "so after we had spent nine months working on this thing, we basically had to start over." And that was what he and Rodat did, but by that point too much time had passed, and Blizzard wasn't willing to give an extension to the team that had already put in nine months on a project that Blizzard knew full well it didn't want to go ahead.

"Honestly, I think it was mismanagement on their behalf, not to explain to us that the first story was vetoed long ago," Raimi says. "Why did they let us keep working on it? Were they afraid to tell me?"

When Raimi described his departure from the Warcraft movie project [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/118554-Sam-Raimi-Departs-World-of-Warcraft] last year, it sounded more like a scheduling conflict. This latest revelation is a bit more to the point; perhaps Blizzard ought to have stepped in before nine month's worth of work was wasted.

Source: The Vulture [http://www.vulture.com/2013/03/sam-raimi-on-oz-and-two-huge-films-he-never-made.html]


Permalink

 

[Combustion Kevin]

does anyone get the feeling that the hype about there being a Blizzard movie project is possibly worth more to Blizzard than a finished work (on which they would be judged) might well be ?...

doubt it, a Warcraft movie would fill a ton of seats, people googling after any details they can find about a project that got cancelled doesn't exactly rake in the dough.

 

[Ralen-Sharr]

The only part of this that surprises me is that Blizzard wasn't doing it themselves. They have pretty good cinematics.

 

[Skeleon]

Honestly? Warcraft's story was extremely cookie-cutter, anyway (I haven't kept up with it since Frozen Throne, but up to that point it wasn't that outstanding). It would've been a rather generic movie (unless Raimi planned to do something interesting with it, of course). Blizzard isn't really known for their story-telling but for their gameplay (which they keep remaking, damn them).

Quite a dickish move not to note your reservations during the production process of the script and instead opting to veto it at the end of the process for "unspecified reasons". But then I have been highly skeptical of Blizzards methods for years now. I just don't... understand them.

 

[kailus13]

Curiouser and curiouser. On the one hand we have Blizzard acting irrationally, and on the other hand we have the man behind Spiderman 3, so we don't know whether it was so awful that they decided to "neglect" to tell him that they didn't like his script.

 

[Aeshi]

Thank fuck for that, we have plenty of god-awful video-game movies already.

 

[BoogieManFL]

Knowing Blizzard these days, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if it was 100% their fault.

 

[Fappy]

While I am glad it was shot down (face it guys, it would have been terrible), I can't help but feel bad for Raimi. Nine months is a lot of time to have go down the drain.

 

[Bat Vader]

I like that Blizzard had veto power on script changes. I think more developers need to have that or 100% control of the project when they plan on letting someone turn their game into a movie. That way we might actually start getting movies that stay truthful to the game.

 

[mronoc]

I'm seeing a surprising amount of gamers heaving a sigh of relief. People seem to be forgetting that the one underwhelming film Raimi's made in his career is the one that was ruined by executives getting in the way of the movie he was trying to make.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

I like that Blizzard had veto power on script changes. I think more developers need to have that or 100% control of the project when they plan on letting someone turn their game into a movie. That way we might actually start getting movies that stay truthful to the game.

Agreed. Too many times have popular stories/books been in line to be made into movies, but during the process we get moronic directors along with nutty screenplay writers that end up doing their darnedest to ignore the source material they are given and say, "Well this won't work, we have to change this, this, this, this, oh and we can't have this."

Finally, if the movie does end up getting finished and released, it turns out the only thing that clues you in that the movie is an adaption of the book is the title of the movie.

I understand if a book as been made into a movie multiple times and the proper and truest story adaption has already been done, then people can make whatever crazy adaption they want, but if the property has never been made into a properly adapted movie, then whatever director and screenplay writer gets a hold of it had better damn well hug and hold onto the source material like it was oxygen and they would die if they aren't in contact with it 24/7.

 

[Skeleon]

Their writing prior to TBC was fairly standard with relatively few fuck ups, but from about WoW and onwards it just became increasingly bad. If you're familiar with Wh40k's most hated writer then imagine an entire writing staff dipping into that territory most of the time they 'produce' anything. That's not really cookie cutter so much as depressingly sad.

Can't say that I do know the most hated writer, but I am aware of some really shitty (and some really good!) WH40K stories. Anyway, I guess generic/cookie-cutter would've been preferable at that point, eh? To be honest, I never started with WoW. I had my fill of MMORPGs with UO years ago.

Curiouser and curiouser. On the one hand we have Blizzard acting irrationally, and on the other hand we have the man behind Spiderman 3, so we don't know whether it was so awful that they decided to "neglect" to tell him that they didn't like his script.

Not really, they could've just vetoed it early on if it was bad. I don't really see this as an excuse.

I like that Blizzard had veto power on script changes. I think more developers need to have that or 100% control of the project when they plan on letting someone turn their game into a movie. That way we might actually start getting movies that stay truthful to the game.

That's actually true, veto-power is a useful thing to have for protecting a story-universe meant for translation onto other media. That said, it seems they really should've used it months earlier.

 

[TsunamiWombat]

So basically it was Starcraft: Ghost. Blizzard has a history of mismanaging outsourced projects. They cannot into outsourcing.

 

[Worgen]

The script probably wasn't bad enough for blizzards taste. It needed to take more elements from other blizzard games.

 

[vid87]

I'm seeing a surprising amount of gamers heaving a sigh of relief. People seem to be forgetting that the one underwhelming film Raimi's made in his career is the one that was ruined by executives getting in the way of the movie he was trying to make.

Honestly, I don't play WOW so I don't really have a sense of what the story is about, but for a while I was somewhat hopeful that a major director would be handling an IP like this. Now, especially with the line about keeping in his "own sense of aesthetics," I'm starting to wonder: was this movie, about the mystical epic world of Warcraft, going to actually work when the director's "aesthetics" include these?:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWJQR6SNMF8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC_XT-HdBvE


At the risk of sounding un-adventurous and bland, it definitely would've been a unique take on it, but I just don't think it would've been...good.

 

[wetfart]

And then Ash killed Arthas and all the undead, but before he could go home he had to go to Sanctuary and deal with some guy named Diablo so Deckard Cain could give him the potion to sleep for 100 years per drop....