World of Warcraft needs a win. The 11 year old game isn’t at its best. A new expansion, Legion, and the movie are on the way, which could be the things that revitalize the series. But, so much has happened to beat the MMORPG down in the last year. We’ve reached a point where this movie could be the thing that deals the final blow to the series, rather than saves it.
First, a little background. We have no idea how successful the World of Warcraft game is anymore. Back in August 2015, we learned the MMORPG had lost 44% of its entire subscriber base in a six month period. The last subscriber figure we have is from November 2015, when the current subscriber number was revealed to be 5.5 million. As a refresher, at its Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm heights, the game was drawing 11-12 million subscribers. With that last 5.5 million subscriber update, Activision Blizzard said it would no longer report on subscriber numbers. That isn’t a good sign.
There hasn’t been good PR for World of Warcraft and Activision Blizzard as of late, either. Nostalrius, the most popular fan-run vanilla server project, was shut down by Blizzard in April 2016. Quite an unhappy outcry poured out, even though the company was within its rights to shut down something that could be stealing money from it, especially in an age where we already know World of Warcraft is hurting for subscribers. The developers agreed to meet with the former Nostalrius team, but will that result in anything? It seems to me more like an attempt to squelch bad publicity.
Which brings us to the World of Warcraft movie. Everything we already know about this projects suggests it’ll be closer to those bad Hitman , Mortal Kombat , and Street Fighter movies in terms of quality, instead of being closer to Tomb Raider, Wreck-It Ralph, and The Wizard. This is a movie where work started on it back in 2006. It’s gone through directors and writers. We went from Sam Raimi, a man who’s directed 22 movies and produced 51, directing it, to Duncan Jones, a man who’s biggest claim to fame is being David Bowie’s son and who has only directed two other movies. It’s gone through multiple writers, starting with Robert Rodat, going to Charles Leavitt, and now Jones as well has his name on it. This is all before the movie spent 20 months in post-production.
Jones’ involvement highlights another potential issue for the World of Warcraft movie. How many of the movie’s actors do you actually know? The people starring in this aren’t big names. I only recognize Paula Patton, and not from her acting credits. It’s because of the Robin Thicke scandal. I know Travis Fimmel is from Vikings , and Dominic Cooper was in Agent Carter , but that’s it. With a supposedly AAA movie, you expect a few famous faces to want to be affiliated with and sign on to it. We don’t have that here. It could mean they didn’t like the script, which isn’t a good thing. It could suggest more money was spent on special effects than actors, which also isn’t the best thing to consider.
The World of Warcraft movie feels like it could be trouble, which is exactly what the game doesn’t need right now. Activision Blizzard has a new Legion expansion it needs to be pushing. It’s at a point where the number of subscribers is so low, it doesn’t talk about them anymore. We should be seeing a company doing its best to pull a 180. Instead, it seems like we could get a chance to bear witness to a video game movie the likes of which we haven’t seen since Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li or 1993’s Super Mario Bros.