It's been a while since anything new popped up for the announced Warcraft movie, leaving it another dormant movie hopeful like many others hinted or announced before. After a gathering of movie producers and game developers at the recently concluded Hollywood & Games Summit, however, it appears that the movie project is still active and Blizzard has been monitoring its progress closely.

Blizzard has toyed with the Warcraft theme in RTS and MMO genres, so it wouldn't be surprising that they've mentioned about being serious in expanding its universe beyond games and novels. And although Legendary Pictures won't be using any of the stories or characters that Blizzard or the novels have used, Big Blue's intent on making the movie an authentic experience of the Warcraft intellectual property.

"We’re supplying quite a bit in terms of story and script development. We’re concentrating on the world and making sure that the experience and feel of the IP is there," said Blizzard's VP Rob Pardo. He mentioned that Legendary Pictures was handpicked from a selection of movie makers, and they made it into Blizzard's cut.

"We got a real good sense that they had a certain amount of geek to them, as we all do," said Pardo, concluding that their movie partner was a natural choice for the expansion of the Warcraft IP to movies.

 

Legendary Pictures chairman and producer of 300 Thomas Tull and game publisher Brash Entertainment CEO Mitch Davis recently delivered the Hollywood & Games keynote entitled Driving Mythology Forward. They gave a very riveting speech on the difficulties in crossing over from one medium to the next, but what might interest most people though is Tull's references to the up and coming movie based on Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

He addressed the community of gamers who have grown to become rather wary of movies based on video games and why the World of Warcraft movie would be different. He cited 300 as an example of a medium which has traversed the boundaries of media.

We’re doing World of Warcraft, and making it into a movie. I have very strong feelings -- from the movie side -- that making movies based on games just because they sold well is a really bad idea. There’ve been some like that that weren’t up to snuff just out of the gate.

It doesn’t matter to us if it’s based on a graphic novel like [Frank Miller's] 300, or a TV show – if there’s a great universe and story, that’s what’s interesting to us. Sure, there are 8 million people playing WoW, but even if all of those people saw the movie multiple times, we’d still be screwed. It’s a jumping off point and we see it as larger than that. World of Warcraft has the right stuff to make it happen.

Those are very interesting statements coming from the man who created a movie very faithful to the source material, yet entertaining enough for those who haven't read the graphic novel.

Will he be working his magic with this movie and bringing the game to the big screen with the amount of accuracy that gamers will be looking for and at the same time providing a memorable experience for those who have never played a single Warcraft game?

If you want to read more on this, click on the full article.

We love machinima. Those in game movies span in variety (just like Hollywood, we note) from socially conscious to movie and television series spoofs. Just goes to show just how many things you can do in the World of Warcraft - other than end game that is. Today, we've got the trailer of Azerothian Espionage by Cameron Gadsby and edited by Ciavarella Studios.

Azerothian Espionage looks like an epic movie, but will this be comparable to Fanatik's work? We'll see that when the actual movie comes out. According to fubarius2 (of YouTube, who also did an amazing job with "It's All Coming Back to Me Now"), the movie will be posted in "several days" and will run approximately 16 minutes.

We'll keep our eyes peeled for that and for the meantime, you can watch the trailer for Azerothian Espionage. Stay tuned for more World of Warcraft movies.

Here are some pictures of the surprisingly quiet Burning Crusade launch at Chicago. Opening at midnight, the retail stores proved to be rather efficient with their service to the people lined up outside the icy, cold night.

True, there weren't any fancy fireworks, Hollywood-ish events, nor rare appearances from the head honchos of Blizzard. But nonetheless, the launch pulled off without a hitch, and, well, the fans were just happy to finally have this expansion of WoW. And nobody was robbed at gunpoint.

Knowing that there are eight million of them fans out there, we sure hope there's enough to go around for everybody.

 

It's not everyday that game-related stuff hits the showbiz scene. And by that, we're talking about interviews by show-business-related media on game-related dudes, NOT some celebrity endorsing some new console or games.

That's why we were pleasantly surprised by this snippet we found over at Hollywood Reporter, which had run an interview on Blizzard's VP of game design, Rob Pardo.

Among other things, the interview went through some of the game's large-scale accomplishments, such as its whopping eight million gamer population worldwide - enough people to legally declare WoW a small country.

But getting back to Mr. Pardo, the interview also mentions Time Magazine's selection of Rob as one of the 100 most influential people of the year, which - for better or for worse - includes guys like Stephen Colbert and Hugo Chavez.

As the interview went:

The Hollywood Reporter: One of the 100 most influential people in the world? That's quite an honor! How does creating a game like "World of Warcraft" entitle you to ...

Rob Pardo: [Laughing] I have no idea. I'm just a nerdy game designer who really enjoys making games. But I guess video games are getting more and more attention as the population ages and as games become a viable entertainment medium for a large number of people, especially for those in their 30s who may have grown up with games. People are very invested in entertainment, especially in something like "WoW," which is very social and where you can meet friends and folks from all around the world. I mean, I've seen people who have met their future wives online. When something becomes that popular, I think that's the main reason why a publication like "Time" would be interested in us.

The full interview's over at the read link.