‘Warcraft’ sets records in Chinese market while stumbling in the U.S
wsj.com
wsj.com
I also liked the new Alice movie..
I think Blizzard isn't used to the movie scene so didn't pay off the critics like most movie studios probably do -- so they got blackmailed. Terrible how that works..
I'd say it had more to do with Duncan Jones making a fun movie for the fans, rather than some edgy gritty crap for the critics to sniff their own farts to.
For sure. They're set up to be a great fantasy series
The movie is based on the books. There are a ton of Warcraft books - I haven't read them but after seeing the movie I might.
22% on RT is ridiculous. I bet that goes up a lot over time. This story of good/evil people, where each group has good and evil people within it, along with good and evil magic is as good as star wars in my opinion, just in 2016-level graphics instead. It's another lesson that races, religion, etc. don't define whether people are good or not.
Edit: check out this video of chinese audiences cheering for the Blizzard logo: https://youtu.be/l67mA7ah9qE?t=51s
I saw it with my wife who was an avid Chinese WoW player back in her college years. It was pretty much as expected: visuals are good, story was edited to heck, and the acting was...just bad. The reaction from other movie goers weren't that positive either...we heard people complaining about the story on the way out (this is Beijing BTW), though I don't think anyone thought it was "bad."
Consoles were banned in China for two decades--basically a whole generation had limited access to games except on PC. In addition to this, there was the censorship that excluded many other foreign games, further condensing audience population on games like Warcraft.
For Chinese young people born in the 80s and 90s, Warcraft is something like Star Wars, it's one of the things that gets to represent their childhood memory and teenage years.
The Red Alert series, also hugely popular for the same generation of people, despite being banned, would probably have enjoyed similar success in China.
That is an interesting remark. Usually film adaptions go the other way and frustrate those familiar with the books/games/whatever by spending a bunch of time explaining the setting, presumably on the assumption that most of the audience is coming in knowing nothing.
i would say in china, the fascination was more about the hype, most people probably never played any of the blizzard games that went to see the movie
Also WoW is/was absolutely huge in China and their business model there is different (you pay per hour to play at net cafes rather than buying the game and your own subscription) so there's a good chance that many of the people seeing the movie have at least played some WoW.
Edit: Fixed broken grammar.
That's like 99% of all movies.
My criticism of the movie has to do with the pacing, acting, and the scope of the movie, but the premise is not too bad. You have Orcs who need to colonize a new world in order to survive (what other choice do they have?), and you have humans who understandably don't want Orcs to start moving in. There are good guys and bad guys on both sides.
SPOILER: This isn't what happens in the movie, btw. The bad guy is still around.
At least there are some good guys among the bad and a bad guy among the good; so it adds some drama.
Tell me what action/fantasy/sci-fi movie is not good guy vs. bad guy ? More specifically, bad guys have an evil plan to do something destructive, and good guys somehow ruins it. Star War, X men, all the superheros ones, 007, and I can keep name more (at least that is the theme of the individual movies, if not the theme of the whole sequence).
The critique Warcraft received most is about the lack of character development; lack of a clear lead actor/actress. In some sense, it is not necessarily a bad thing because it breaks the old "one dude with protagonist aura that never dies" Holywood pattern.
There are lots of scifi movies where the story only barely, rather than primarily, deals with the idea of good guys versus bad guys, if it puts them together directly at all. Moon, The Martian, Gravity are recent ones. Interstellar, in its way.
Less true of fantasy which pulls its stories from the idea of grand epics with noble warriors fighting monsters and villains.
Action movies without an idea of good guy and bad guy is a challenge. Maybe I'll think of one while I lie in bed tonight but off the top of my head there aren't any occurring to me.
For those that haven't seen it, it's pretty much only worth seeing in theaters, in 3D.
Ice Station Zebra http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063121/
It's a pity if you have watched the CGI animations in Blizzard games. I think that was what most of the people were waiting but they decided to use real humans (which small bodies don't match at all with the overbuild bodies in CGI) with a terrible acting instead.
Similarly, Hollywood in general has shown me every other time that I've given 'film adaptation of X' in my life that the original form was better. Were I interested in the story of WoW I suppose the best form to experience it in would be in the actual game (I've heard players of that game admit that parts of it are better left un-played and that they are this fine with the now more rapid ascent to newer content in the game).
For one example, Forrest Gump is based on a pretty crappy book. It's mildly entertaining but it's pretty wacky and definitely not the amazing classic that the movie was. For another one that turns up a lot, The Godfather is said to be a lot better than the book, although I haven't read it myself. One more, Pirates of the Caribbean, while not exactly deep and meaningful, is a pretty fun movie based on a pretty mediocre amusement park ride.
I will admit that I can't come up with any good movies based on a video game.
Another source of trouble, I think, is that a movie based on something well known can survive on name recognition, so it doesn't have to be good. A Warcraft movie could be good in theory, but they probably haven't bothered.