When Sam Raimi took on the Spider-Man franchise in 2002, the superhero movie was in the doldrums. Batman had descended into a vapid, campy trough, and it had been 15 years since Superman last patrolled the skies.
Raimi's bright and breezy adaptation, however, was perfectly positioned. He picked the right villain (the Green Goblin) and the right actor to portray him (a brilliantly sneery Willem Dafoe), and he established the right love-triangle dynamic between Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson and Harry Osborn. It was an impressive feat, especially given the dire results produced by other film-makers then working in the same milieu: Mark Steven Johnson's brutally dumb Daredevil and Ang Lee's misguided Hulk, for instance. And yet, in agreeing to take on the big-screen adaptation of multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, Raimi has set himself a challenge that makes his achievements with the Spider-Man franchise look like a walk in the park.
Raimi has form: his CV includes the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess and the third Evil Dead film, Army of Darkness, but he still has to beat strong odds. The history of fantasy film-making is littered with insipid efforts: 1984's Conan the Destroyer, with Arnold Schwarzenegger; 1985's Red Sonja, with Brigitte Nielsen; and, more recently, Eragon. When you narrow it down to movie adaptations of video games, the lineup is even worse. This genre can boast some of the most abominable examples of film-making of the past decade or so, many proudly bearing the legend: A Film By Uwe Boll. To put it bluntly, there has never been a decent movie emerging from this type of source material.
That should, perhaps, come as no surprise. Good fantasy films – Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, John Milius's Conan the Barbarian – drew on vast mythologies carefully concocted by their respective original authors. While World of Warcraft features a variety of legends and storylines in its various expansion packs and related novels, there is nothing like the depth involved in The Lord of the Rings – for which Tolkien, a professor of English at Oxford University, forged entire histories and even invented languages.
Moreover, World of Warcraft is designed as a multiplayer environment within which thousands of players interact at the same time, fighting, questing, building their characters' skills and experience levels. Even to a novice such as myself, it's a remarkably impressive universe from a gaming point of view – but will it really have the depth to form the basis of a great movie?
All of this simply means that Raimi is working from square one. While he has a responsibility to make the movie fit the WoW universe, he ought to have carte blanche to work within that dynamic. Internet buzz suggests that a draft script has been submitted by Chris Metzen, an artist and author who is vice-president of creative development in WoW owner Blizzard Entertainment. But I would still expect Raimi to have control of where he takes things from here. With his recent horror hit, Drag Me to Hell, he showed that he can still craft something fresh and original. Let's hope he finds the right sweet spot for World of Warcraft in between pleasing the fans and creating something that can stand with the best examples of the genre.
What do you think? Is this just a case of Raimi taking the cash, or do you believe he retains the energy and swords-and-sorcery nous to make World of Warcraft into something special? And for the gamers out there, which story arcs might make a good starting point for the screenplay? What will Raimi need to include to ensure this really feels like a World of Warcraft movie?
