Blown away, are we? Yes, it's true: the Warcraft movie is confirmed to be budgeted with over US$ 100 million (to compare, "LotR 3" had around US$ 90 million, while "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" got around US$ 120 million). This and a couple other details about the upcoming movie have been outlined during the BlizzCon event.

A panel composed of Paul Sams (Blizzard chief operating officer), Chris Metzen (Blizz chief creatives officer), and Thomas Tull (Legendary Pictures chairman) talked about the movie coming out. Aside from revealing their budget, here's the long and short of the Q&A session:

• it's scheduled for a 2009 release
• live-action with digital effects
• will run for about two hours to two and a half hours
• Thrall, Cairne Bloodhoof, Bolvar Fordragon likely to appear, Arthas won't
  
• no director, no actors named yet

Sweet. Expounding on the story now, they say that it won't be like LotR - a "journey type of tale." Their silverscreen adaptation of Warcraft will revolve around the aches and pains experienced by the various races as tensions between them rise. They actually thought of basing the movie's story line on the very first RTS game - a story between the humans and orcs. But now, because of how much the franchise has grown, the story has to be far meatier than that.

Right now, the plot would be told from the perspective of the Alliance and will be set about a year before the events in World of Warcraft. To give some vague comparison, Thomas Tull was eying a blend of blockbuster elements like those found in 300, Gladiator, and Braveheart. Epic fun? Hellsyeah.

The picture above was taken from the Q&A session at BlizzCon. It shows an actual storyboard panel used for the movie, and it shows Teldrassil, the big "life tree" of the Night Elves.

 

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?

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