Blizzard Entertainment has been working on bringing their hit online game World of Warcraft to the big screen for years. It's one of the most popular MMORPGs of all-time, and so they've hooked up with Legendary Pictures to try to match that success in Hollywood. Sam Raimi had been involved but he split last year,but now they've found a more than worthy replacement in Moon and Source Code director Duncan Jones.
THR reports that Jones will take over the film, which recently added Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond) to pen a new draft of the script. Jones is a fantastic director who has been involved on the technical side of some video games before, but to me this feels like a step down. He had been planning a pair of projects, including an Ian Fleming biopic and one that's described as similar to Blade Runner, so this will surely bump them back even further. Then again, there hadn't been any real progress on them, anyway. Maybe a paycheck gig like this will help push his other stuff forward?A tracking board, which are basically just places where Hollywood gossip goes to fester, is saying that Johnny Depp may be sought to star. To be fair, Depp's name turns up for pretty much everything in the initial stages. But assuming it's true, it tells me the screen version of WOW may be more family-oriented than the games are.
The question now is how they plan on presenting the multi-faceted WOW world, which includes ogres, dragons, kung fu pandas, wizards, aliens, and all sorts of stuff that doesn't naturally go together. Filming is being aimed for fall 2013 for a release in 2015.[via Bleeding Cool]
