WARCRAFT: the movie

or, notes on an alternate reality classic

another world

It’s 2018 and the TV’s on in the living room even though no one’s there to watch it. The house has always been like this. The TV plays whether anyone is there to keep it company or not. Often replaying Sportscenter or Simpson or Friends reruns. The phone rings on the wall and you ignore it because it’s not really your house. You just live there.

You pick up the remote and flip through channels, punching past Chronicles of Riddick and Highlander and other movies that seem to always be on but you only ever find halfway through, and you happen to hit the time just right to catch the opening monologue in a deep voice and then you see a big green CGI dude who actually looks pretty good.

You sit down and let it pour over you, getting snacks at the next commercial break and using the bathroom at some later commercial break, and after a few hours the afternoon’s just about done even though you’re still home alone. You go to the phone on the wall and call up your friend to make plans for the evening now upon you and you can’t wait to tell them about this weird ass movie you just watched based on a videogame.

hoarding the bonfire’s ash

The streaming era has been a disaster for the film industry. It’s been very convenient and even quite good for consumers. We have more to watch than ever before at cheaper than ever before and some of it is even better than just about anything that came before, but the cost, hidden from us at the time, was that the wheels are falling off and this is all grinding to a halt.

Streaming has decimated film profits as they rush to compete with Netflix, which was propped up for about a decade by tech investors and tax schemes that allowed it to run at a loss even while it grew exponentially. This has led to industrial consolidation as profits got choked and disappeared. It’s also destroyed the midlist movie, which is a movie that doesn’t cost a lot (relatively speaking) and probably won’t win an award or become a run away blockbuster smash. Movies that cost maybe $10-40mil and make maybe $40-100mil at the box office.

Back before streaming, even if these movies ran at a loss, they’d often make that up in rentals or syndication deals. Which is why, back in the 90s and 2000s, you might run across a bunch of not very good movies on some cable channel. Some of these seemed to be constantly on TV and so you ended up seeing The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift, for example, seven times, though never from start to finish, over the course of a few years. Maybe you’d catch the first half hour on Monday and then the back half the following Tuesday and eventually you’d catch the ten or twenty minutes you missed, but the following Thursday you stumble into the last half hour and decide to watch it just because it’s on.

Instead, now, we have the indie movie that studios hope wins an award, which will cause them to hopefully blow up at the box office or in Bluray or digital sales, or you have blockbusters that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, a hundred more to advertise, so studios need it to make half a billion to break even.

The fact that several of the big studios chased Netflix into streaming and so sunk billions of dollars into loss without hopes of getting enough subscribers for these to turn a profit has accelerated the demise and consolidation of studios.

brimming with promise

David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, had a promising career. He directed Moon, which was a micro-budget SF movie that was massively influential and acclaimed, nominated for and winning some awards.

It also, most importantly, turned a profit.

So he followed the normal Hollywood trajectory, which is that they gave him a chance to make a movie for them as a director for hire. If this was a success, he’d get the budget to make one for himself.

And Jones had big ambitions.

Source Code, his sophomore movie, was a critical and commercial success and so the studios gave him a shot at an enormous budget to make the movie he wanted: Warcraft.

Warcraft, for those somehow unaware, is a videogame franchise. World of Warcraft essentialized the MMORPG and is still going strong twenty years later.

An up-and-coming director on a hot streak attaching himself to one of the biggest media franchises felt like a stroke of genius. Especially since the fantasy genre had never been so hot (Game of Thrones was at its peak when this was released) and with every studio trying to will into existence another Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, this just looked like a license to print money.

Of course, the fight it had against it was that there had never really been a well-received videogame adaptation (though sometimes they were financially successful enough to warrant a sequel).

And, babies, I would love to say that Warcraft was the first one.

And it did pretty well at the box office! Earning $400mil! But that number made it a failure since it needed to earn half a billion dollars just to break even.

And so its failure capsized Duncan Jones’ career. He got another chance at a Netflix exclusive movie that was a dream project for him that he had been trying to get made for a long time.

But it was a critical failure and while Netflix doesn’t release streaming numbers except when it feels like it, it’s safe to say it didn’t lead to a spike in new subscribers.

It looks like he’s finally getting another shot with an animated movie due out next year. But if it fails as well, it may be the end for Mr Jones.

But there was a possible version of events where Warcraft had a long tail.

what could have been

In another version of reality where streaming never happened, Warcraft would’ve become a massive cult hit. In this version of reality, Warcraft breaks even or turns a profit in rentals and then grows into one of those movies that gets thrown onto cable and has a long, long life where a generation of people end up seeing it a dozen times on accident.

A movie that seems perpetually on in the background where you start learning all the dialogue just because it keeps happening in earshot. Where most of the scenes become iconic, not because of their quality, but because of the quantity of times you’ve sat through them.

It’s a movie almost designed to fill twitter and instagram with reactions images and gifs for memes, and yet it has instead no cultural impact.

Part of this is because it never got released widely on streaming. And so after its financially unsuccessful theatrical run, it just got buried. There was no way to watch it unless you wanted to buy the Bluray or pay for digital rentals.

Digital rentals are definitely convenient but I can’t imagine they come close to how successful the rental market that I grew up with was. Why spend $3.99 on a movie when you have literally thousands of movies already included in your subscription for no additional charge?

And so Warcraft, like many other movies, just got lost.

Which is really too bad because I do think there’s a lot to like about this movie.

there’s gold in them hills

The number of unsuccessful or critically derided Hollywood adaptations of videogames is about as long as the list of videogame adaptations itself.

It was, in many ways, a cursed prospect. Seemed like a goldmine but one where no one managed to actually find any gold.

In the last few years, this has changed. Spearheaded by HBO’s critically acclaimed The Last of Us adaptation and the billion dollars Mario made at the theatrical box office, we finally seem primed to find the potential here in videogames becoming movies and TV shows.

And I do think this will be the next goldrush in Hollywood.

If the last twenty years belonged to superheroes and comics, I think the next decade or more may belong to videogame adaptations.

The videogame industry, in terms of sheer dollars, stands like a colossus beside the human-sized film industry. And so the market is there, in terms of built in audiences. We’re talking tens of millions of potential viewers for every major videogame franchise. And we’re beginning to see studios identifying this potential ocean of profit, with dozens of franchises getting optioned.

The problems, I think, with many videogame adaptations come in a few different flavors.

1. Made by people who don’t care about the franchise

2. Made by people with too much devotion to the stories already told

3. Made for people who don’t like videogames

The first category sort of sums up the vast majority of videogame adaptations thus far. This is often the failure of live action adaptations of anime. You get people who are excited to tell their own story but some studio executive says: Could you map that over this IP that we have the rights to?

And you end up with an adaptation that manages to make no one happy.

The second actually includes the critically acclaimed The Last of Us adaptation. Which is also why I haven’t bothered to watch it. Watching it takes longer than it does to play the dang game.

No thank you.

But this also summarizes the problem with Duncan Jones’ Warcraft movie.

The Last of Us adaptation also fits into number three. In order for people to take the adaptation seriously, they had to assure you that this was a real work of art made for big boys instead of little babies.

But outside of The Last of Us, which is made by people who care with slavish devotion to the source and aims at people who never played the game, the recent successful videogame adaptations are instead made by people who care about the games but are more interested in using those worlds and characters to tell their own stories.

The Mario movie is never for a single moment anything but a Mario movie, yet it’s also not trying to retell the story of some specific game. Instead, it takes the buoyant joy of Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom and chooses to make an original story that hits very well for parents and children, all of whom already recognize Mario.

The Fallout adaptation is a whole lot of fun and hit perfectly for me, and I’ve never even played the games! But rather than try to adapt Fallout I or II or IV, it just took the tapestry of that world developed over the various games and gave us a whole new and distinct story that feels at home in that world.

Even the Sonic the Hedgehog movie, which seemed perilously terrible from the trailers, manages to be charming and fun. And they got there by using the textures and essential elements of the game and its characters and then using them to tell a new story that will satisfy kids who are just discovering Sonic and all of us old dummies who remember Sonic mostly as a time of day, as the afterglow of childhood.

bottling a dragon

After all these words, you’re probably expecting a glowing review. If you’re still reading, I don’t have that kind of twist here.

Jones took an interest approach to the world of Warcraft. Rather than try to tackle its most popular incarnation (World of Warcraft), he was setting up an entire franchise to adapt. And so he went back to the story of Warcraft I. Had this been a success, I think it’s clear he would have tried to then tackle them in order.

This was not a bad idea, in general. Though I think there are practical reasons why this didn’t work.

For one, Warcraft the game is simply too big to fit into two or three hours.

There’s too much we need to figure out and care about and all of it unfamiliar unless you know the game well. And, granted, like I said, the built in audience for something like this was already in the tens of millions. So even just getting all of them along with some others would have made this a success, probably.

But trying to pack so much into a single movie makes it feel both lethargic and like it’s sprinting through important things that you imperfectly understand.

When you play Warcraft, the game takes about twenty hours or so, which means that you incrementally learn more and more about the world and the plot and the characters as you move forward. Spending all that time with them, controlling them, allows you to make sense of everything and, more importantly, it makes you care about their fates.

On top of that, Warcraft is kind of silly!

This is on purpose, mind. The games have a sense of humor.

This is a core aspect to the games. And humor, as I’ve often said, is something that makes us care about characters. It’s how we connect to their humanness.

But the movie is just kind of a mess in general. There’s too much plot, too little character, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a lot of fun. Because it is! It’s a fun movie! It’s fun to let it wash over you in all its silly grandiloquence!

And I think, had it come out in 2006 instead of 2016, it would have had a long cultural and financial tail. I worked at Blockbuster back then and this is exactly the type of movie that would’ve flown off the shelves. Friday and Saturday night of the first available rental weekend would’ve filled with teenagers already reeking of pot who would giggle and be awestruck by the movie in equal measure. In a year, it would have been all over cable TV and I would’ve stumbled across it random hungover Sunday mornings where I would’ve laid there near comatose and let it rain down upon me.

But I do think a better tactic would have been to tell smaller stories within this world. Rather than tell the story of interspecies war at its highest level and from the highest level, we could have learned about smaller scale conflicts.

Remember, we only have two hours here!

Tell me the story of a single squad in a single battalion in a single army on a single campaign and let me see this conflict—in a close, personal way—from their vantage point.

Or give me a story of political intrigue that never leaves the palace!

But these are all wishes and wants and hopes.

Though, if you’ve been contacted to write a screenplay adapting something, give me a call. I’m very cheap and my schedule is open.

And despite all that I’ve said here, the movie is well acted and the CGI actually looks good! And for those who have read my recent movie reviews, you probably know how infrequently I say such things. But I like the way the orcs look!

I do think that if the movie had been just a bit better it would’ve broken even and we would have had a sequel or two by now. Because had it just been 10% better, word of mouth would’ve pushed just enough more people to go see it.

But, really, this is a story of how Hollywood has changed and why it’s in freefall. The dollar amounts are just too high and too risky to be sustainable.

But also I just wish that a movie like this had succeeded. Had it had a rental and syndication run, it would’ve turned a profit and then some, and possibly made a sequel that became as big as the Avengers.

Though its failure is also a cautionary tale, not only to those adapting games, but to anyone interested in telling a story in a movie: be a bit more modest and focused.

Tell a closer story. Something more personal.

There’s heart in this movie. Even a real tragedy at its core, which appeals to me quite a bit. But it’s wrapped up too tightly in devotion to the source material, which overcrowds what’s beautiful and great about this adaptations.

So it goes.