14 DAY TRIAL // Currently, the World of Warcraft movie has some huge names working on it, so it is slowly working its way towards the select few video-game adaptations that could actually prove to be quality cinematic experience. With director Sam Raimi and Robert Rodat, the same one that did Saving Private Ryan, as the writer, Hollywood's version of WoW might just reach a number of viewers close to the 11 million people that actually play the game. But the production took a few turns along the way, and where it started is a rather different place from the path that it's currently on.
The first sketches for the film were a lot closer to the original story and universe, as the script was, at first, outlined by Gary Whitta. A former games journalist and current screenwriter, he discussed his initial blueprints for the flick with 1UP. "I did actually write three different drafts of the script, and I worked very closely with Blizzard over the period of about a year or so," he said.
"I think in the end I came up with a movie that I thought was really cool, but what happened with Sam [Raimi] is that they always wanted a big director, and they landed one of the biggest with Sam. I think he'll make an incredible movie," Whitta added. "But he just had a very different vision. He wanted to tell a completely different story, so they went a different way. I thought I did a good job that people who love the game would get a good account of the world. All the major races, all the major places, and some of the lesser known ones were in there. There were some cool Easter eggs if you really knew the game back to front."
The one thing that Whitta believed stood out for his script was that it "felt that it was true to the world of the game," and, while players everywhere might have loved that more than anything, it's pretty easy to see why, in the end, a big director had other plans for the movie. Switching from a script writer that has experience with the gaming world to one that that has a film-industry one would make the film more generic, and more easily understandable for people that are less, or not at all, familiar with the Warcraft universe.
Still, if you're curious to see what a Gary Whitta film would have looked like, then you need to look no further than at the upcoming The Book of Eli. The Denzel Washington flick will be out in cinemas in mid-January and it has a strangely familiar Fallout 3 flavor.