14 DAY TRIAL // World of Warcraft is, without a doubt, the most popular MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) out there, with over 12 million paying subscribers every month. It dominates the market and has brought its developer and publisher, Blizzard, quite a lot of money in the past 4 years since its launch.
As further testimony to the cult following the one the online game enjoys, its second expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, sold 2,8 million copies in the first 24 hours since its launch, making it the best selling PC game in history, and overtaking the first expansion to WoW, The Burning Crusade. The massive number of fans has made Blizzard partner with Legendary Pictures in order to make a movie based on the story of the game.
Although not much has been said regarding it, we do know that it is still in the early stages of development. Frank Pearce, executive VP of product development at Blizzard, recently talked about it and expressed the fact that, although the idea of his company making a completely CG (Computer Graphics) animated movie had been tackled, the project wouldn't be feasible.
"The idea has come up in discussions but it’s not something we’ve really considered because it takes so long to generate just the brief amount of footage that we create for the game. It would definitely be really cool. There’s no question about that, it’s just that the quantity of work that it would take is more than we’re willing to take on at this point. We’ve got a lot of work to do as it relates to ‘WoW’… we’ve got all this stuff in the pipe and that would just be one more thing on top of it."
An interesting statement coming from Pearce, which goes to prove that, although the awesome cutscenes from the Warcraft and WoW games look good, a lot of time and effort have been spent making them. Let's just hope that this WoW movie will be good, and perhaps it will wash away the negative image that game-based movies have with the gaming community.