[Movie] Warcraft

Indeed, as the film proves.

 

double post, dammit.

 

Never would complain about nudity

Fimmel will (and rightly so) be demanding more money in his future installments for The Vikings and (hopefully) Warcraft, which concerns me if they have to cut a larger pie of the budget for the actors.

 

This felt like watching a fan made movie with a blockbuster budget. Duncan Jones has made some nifty little films but this was bad.

 

I played a ton of Warcraft II when I was 12. I would have loved this movie when I was 12.

 

Hey, give it a chance! It has great GA reviews.

I do wonder where their budget exactly went to. I'm sure the actors weren't paid too much.

 

It's all on the screen. It didn't go to whoever wrote the screenplay.

 

Usually the general public has terrible taste (Transformers), so these GA scores really don't excite me much. I really hope they haven't wasted the immense acting talent they have but it seems to be inevitable. Hopefully the sequels improve.

 

Not going to catch it in the theater, but thinking of watching it online. Is it worth the time for someone who hasn't played a minute of the game?

 

I was able to catch this movie yesterday thanks to the T-Mobile free tuesday deal they had. Scored two tickets, and my bro and I went to watch it in 3D.

I played the original Warcraft RTS games, and we both put a good amount of time into the World of Warcraft game some years back. I honestly don't remember too much about the game, and much less about the world/lore.

Once the credits rolled, I turned to my bro and said, "I like it." He responded in a surprising tone, "Yeah me too." We didn't find the story too hard to follow. The human characters don't exactly draw you in, and I think casting was part of it. The orc side of the film was pretty good. The small nods to players was cool, and I really tried to imagine if I didn't know any of it, would I still enjoy the movie. The answer is yes.

I was absolutely amazed at the CGI in this film. The trailers make this movie look like garbage, but it's far from it. It's not a great film, but good. Again, we don't really feel for the human characters too much, and we should. I think Garona (the half orc and human character played by Paula Patton) should have been CGI. She was just herself painted green with some false teeth.

TLDR; It was a surprisingly fun watch with flaws. Don't expect greatness. The CGI was amazing. You can enjoy it and not know jack about Warcraft.

 

I don't think you can fault studios for appealing to the GA and not critics.

However, I believe most would agree Warcraft has a much better universe than Transformers? And that the movie was not just mindless action ala Transformers.

 

So the box office report:

Domestic: $24,166,110
China: $144,700,000
Other: $135,800,000
Worldwide: $304,666,110

First, that's a massive international haul for an otherwise domestic box office bomb. China simply carried this film into black territory. Is that going to be a new norm?

China will soon surpass the US in annual box office gross and the typical Hollywood thinking is to cater as much as possible to Chinese audiences. That is where I think the trap lies.

At the moment China has an insatiable appetite for American entertainment. However, Chinese are generally not trendsetters but rather followers. They are eating up everything Western from fashion to food to films.

For example, Furious 7 made headlines when it had the all time highest opening weekend for China with $182 Million. Sure, Chinese devoured a hot Western commodity, but the headlines overlooked the fact that it took 6 successful entries with American audiences for the franchise to become an international phenomenon.

If those early Furious films had bombed at the domestic box office, there would be no franchise to export. Same can be said of Jurassic World, Mission Impossible, Transformers, and the MCU - all in the top 10 Chinese all-time box office.

The point is that China is an untested market for new IP. Historically, Chinese audiences have flocked to established Hollywood franchises and rejected almost everything else. Therefore, it would be wise for the makers of Warcraft to use caution when green lighting a sequel solely based on the Chinese box office performance.

 

China is a relatively new and certainly enormous market for Hollywood, but there are restrictions on what films they will allow there, a major bummer.