Hollywood director Sam Raimi speaks of Blizzard's "mismanagement" of the World of Warcraft movie
Orcward.
Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code) replaced Sam Raimi (Tobey Maguire Spider-Man) as the director of the World of Warcraft film earlier this year. But we never really knew why - until now.
Sam Raimi spoke to Vulture about Blizzard's "mismanagement" of the project. Essentially he was taking the film in a direction that Blizzard didn't like, but he didn't realise Blizzard had veto power over his rewritten screenplay until it was too late; months of work were wasted by that time and impatience had crept in.
"First they asked me if I wanted to make it and I said, 'Yes, I love World of Warcraft and I think it would make a great picture,'" said Raimi. "So I read a screenplay they had that was written by the guys at Blizzard and it didn't quite work for me.
"I told them I wanted to make my own original story with [the script writer] Robert [Rodat], so we pitched it to Legendary and they accepted it, and then we pitched it to Blizzard, and they had reservations but they accepted it.
"Then Robert wrote the screenplay, and only once he was done did we realise that Blizzard had veto power, and we didn't know that. And they had never quite approved the original story we pitched them. Those reservations were their way of saying, 'We don't approve this story, and we want to go a different way.' So after we had spent nine months working on this thing, we basically had to start over.
"And Robert did start over," he said, "but it was taking too long for the people at Blizzard and their patience ran out. Honestly I think it was mismanagement on their behalf not to explain to us that the first story was vetoed long ago. Why did they let us keep working on it? Were they afraid to tell me?"
Duncan Jones, who describes himself as "a real gamer" - and who was publicly jealous of Raimi's World of Warcraft role while also being very complimentary about his work - now has control.
Turns out Raimi's a bit of a fan of Jones', too. "I loved his movie Moon," he said, "and I think he's a strikingly talented director. I bet that if anyone can do a great job with it, it's him."
Moon schmoon! Duncan Jones will have to produce something really special to outdo my favourite World of Warcraft film. I've posted it below.
