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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

The 2016 Warcraft movie doesn't count? It got a 77% audience score, and a 27% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, grossed almost half a billion, and is the highest grossing video game movie of all time[1].

I watched it out of a sheer morbid curiosity, and haven't played any Warcraft title newer than II: Tides of Darkness. I thought the movie was crap.

But maybe I and critics just aren't the audience for these movies. Seems most people who saw it liked it. Doesn't that make it at least "Good"?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_g...

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> I thought the movie was crap.

I'm a fan of the Warcraft lore (though not where WoW took it). I found it pretty awful too. It seemed to lack a story - "stuff" just seemed to happen. It was like a 6-year old telling a story: there was no coherence or continuity. I've liked tons of movies that have done poorly with critics but a common theme across all of them is that they had a storyline.

To put this in perspective, I enjoyed Doom (2005) which is renowned for being one of the worst game movies around.

It is a cliche to say this, but the movie really was made for fans and not for the general "Normie" audience.

They would just name drop locations and people, expecting you to know what they were. It was just mostly a fan service, "here is your movie, loyal fans!" types.

It still wasn't "great" even if you were a fan, but I can't imagine how bad a lot of it would have come off as if you didn't follow things pretty closely to begin with.

This is exactly how It felt to me.

I've only got pop culture knowledge of World Of Warcraft, and the way they explained most parts of the movie was really hard to follow. They needed:

- More world-building, geography was hard to follow, jumping around too much.

- Better character introduction, characters would just appear, banking on fans recognising them.

- Less assumed knowledge...

The whole movie came off a bit amateurish in how the story was told...

I'm a fan of the game and even with strenuous efforts to score every possible nostalgia point it was terrible.

Another interesting thing about the Warcraft movie is how well it did in China compared to the US ($24m opening weekend in the US vs. $156m first five days in China).

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/02/warcraft-fi...

I have been a fan of Warcraft since I played Warcraft 2: Through the Dark Portal I think.

I played WoW for years starting with US open beta (I'm from the EU) But the movie was just childish and simple. I'm starting to think that I moved on from simple plots to some more interesting things. Like Asimov instead of Star Wars...

This.

I'd suggest it was the exception to the rule. Sure, it's not Oscar material, but it was a thoroughly well made movie - and the ratings support this.

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