10 Years Ago, The Worst Video Game Movie Offered A Dire Warning
Fans are not enough.
Amazon recently canceled its Stargate reboot mere months after officially unveiling it, and the streamer’s logic seemed to encapsulate the out-of-touch nonsense that defines Hollywood decision-making. Stargate, according to Variety, was axed because it would only appeal to Stargate fans. Who could have foreseen?
Fans have launched a campaign to save the series, but it’s likely a doomed endeavor. As absurd as Amazon’s argument may sound on the surface, we’re long past the days when a show like Stargate could be made on the relative cheap for a narrow but passionate fanbase. With genre television now costing millions of dollars per episode, creating something that only appeals to the hardcore is an easy way to flush those millions down the toilet. And 10 years ago today, no project demonstrated that frustrating conundrum better than Warcraft.
The appeal of Warcraft is predicated on your ability to not only recognize names like Anduin Lothar and Grommash Hellscream, but to become emotionally invested in their travails. Directed by Duncan Jones after he made waves with Moon and Source Code, this is a world (of Warcraft) where everyone speaks in portents. And when every line is something like, “Your majesty, I urge you to engage the guardian with all haste,” you begin to feel, like so many of the villain’s victims, your soul being sucked from your body.
Warcraft tries to serve as a crash course on the franchise: the orc homeworld is dying, so the incredibly evil warlock Gul’dan uses incredibly evil magic to bring his people through a portal to the human realm of Azeroth. Warcraft commences as heroic Aragorn-likes attempt to defend their kingdom, and the orcs important enough to get dialogue begin to question the wisdom of following a lich-like mass murderer who, as real ones know, goes by Destroyer of Dreams.
It’s a passable premise, but Warcraft treats it like Shakespearean tragedy even though it looks and sounds like Temu Lord of the Rings. This is a movie that thinks so little of the audience it’s ostensibly made for that a hero mourning his slain son helpfully explains, “In my entire life, I’ve never felt so much pain as I do now.” It’s both impressive and damning that the CGI orcs are often more emotive than the humans.
The Guardian (Ben Foster) after he was engaged with all haste.
We don’t need to belabor the point, but if a film is going to be inscrutable to outsiders, it should at least be interesting, and Warcraft never manages that. To anyone who hasn’t put at least a few dozen hours into the games, it’s like two exhausting hours of listening to someone recount their bog-standard Dungeons and Dragons campaign, all without the franchise’s hokey sense of humor to offer even mild relief.
Blizzard fans had a somewhat warmer reaction, but Warcraft’s problem was that it reached as many fans as it could, and that wasn’t enough. Making $439 million is no small feat, but much of that came from overseas and didn’t nudge the movie past the point of post-distribution profitability. Duncan Jones’ planned sequel failed to materialize, and while Blizzard continues to rake in money from its games, its blockbuster aspirations appear dead (although a movie is being made about Mats Steen, aka Ibelin, a WoW player with muscular dystrophy who was the subject of a Peabody-winning documentary).
Warcraft hits its 10th anniversary at an interesting time for video game movies, as Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is attempting to become the first RE film to, if you’ll indulge some highfalutin technical terminology, not suck complete ass. Cregger appears to be adapting the spirit of the source material, while leaving decades of accumulated story detritus far behind, and while Fallout, The Last of Us, and even Twisted Metal have employed that strategy to considerable acclaim on television, the best we’ve seen on the silver screen so far are still just some Sonic movies that can entertain kids and a couple of modern Mortal Kombat flicks that are sort of okay.
Warcraft’s bottomless lore was just too much for one movie to handle.
Back in 2016, one of the almost universally negative reviews of Warcraft called it “one of the most ill-advised and ill-conceived studio films of this modern blockbuster era,” but gave Universal credit for going "all-in on a summer movie so niche and nerdy.” It was certainly an uncompromising approach, but as critic David Ehrlich alluded to, that was like going all in on a car crash.
As gaming franchises grow ever more valuable, studios will continue to try getting fans into theaters, but fans alone can’t make a $160 million production profitable. Duncan Jones was chosen for Warcraft in part because he’s a fan of the source material himself, and while he claimed the production was a torturous one given all the commercial interests involved, it was ultimately a movie made for the fans, just like fans always say they want. And the result was an unprofitable mess.
One path forward for game movies appears to be indie production; like Markiplier or not, his ability to turn $3 million into $51 million with Iron Lung earlier this year was a remarkable accomplishment. To make something on the scale of Warcraft, though, you’re going to have to open the gates a little and let non-fans in, no matter how much it may compromise the purity of Orgrim Doomhammer. And the Stargate.
Warcraft is available to rent on YouTube.
