After years of Sam Raimi as the chosen Warcraft movie director, there was a lull where he had quit but there was no replacement, and the project looked like it had died. However, recently Duncan Jones was announced as the new director, so it looks like the project is back on.
I've only seen one of Duncan Jones' movies, which was Moon. I actually thought the film was quite good, and had the feel of old-school science fiction that you never seem to see anymore - specifically that it was a science-fiction film and not a sci-fi action film. Mind you, I don't mind the latter category (I did watch the Star Wars movies an absurd number of times as a kid) but I appreciate that this is a director that can handle otherworldly subjects without needing to make everything an explosion.
That said, the Warcraft film is going to be super action-heavy. There is a lot of interesting intrigue going on between the various factions in the Warcraft universe, but this is definitely a world where violence solves problems, and even if there are many conflicting interests between the various factions (and sub-factions,) Warcraft's always been fairly straightforward in its characters' motivations (as much as I'd personally hate him in real life, I think that Garrosh is actually one of the most complicated characters they've come up with - a man who struggles to embody honor without having any idea what honor is.)
So there are a couple hurdles to making the Warcraft film that they'd have to leap. Mind you, as much as I like Jones and the Warcraft setting, let's not fool ourselves - this movie is going to be a disappointment. Video game movies have, at their very best, only ever ascended to guilty-pleasures. And for every Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia (haven't seen either, but I understand them to be "not as terrible as you'd think') there's an Alone in the Dark or In the Name of the King, or a Resident Evil movie where most of the cast gets killed by freaking lasers before the zombies even show up.
Don't expect an epic of deeply nuanced characters here. If you don't, you'll only get a nice surprise if they manage to pull it off.
Ok, so with that sad caveat out of the way, here's the major hurdles:
1. Races!
Warcraft is a setting with many different races. Depending on when they set the movie in the series' timeline, they might be able to keep things limited, but at the absolute least we're going to have Humans (easy enough) and Orcs.
That said, I'd appreciate it if they put in a little effort to show the less traditional races in Warcraft. If they want to distinguish the setting from the generic fantasy setting, then getting the Gnomes, Trolls (dial down the racism a bit, if you can) Tauren, Draenei, Goblins or Worgen in there would do a lot (particularly the Gnomes and Goblins - nothing says "not your average fantasy world" by throwing in 20th century technology.)
How they do these races is another challenge. They're all humanoid, so if you get a Westmore-style makeup team (they did the aliens on Star Trek) you'd probably be able to pull them off decently. If you make them CGI, it could look kind of crappy, but this is also going to be a 100 million dollar movie, so let's hope any CGI characters are more Gollum than Jar-Jar.
However, the absolute most important thing I think they need to make it truly feel like Warcraft and not like generic fantasy is that they need to show how the "monstrous" races are just as human-like as the humans. If the movie's about humans fighting orcs, let's see the Orcs raising their children and practicing shamanism, and show that they're not just berserkers.
2. Story!
The World of Warcraft is a HUGE fantasy world. It's got to be one of the most detailed fictional worlds out there, with tons of books and the absurdly huge amount of story content contained within the games. This is all very good, and will certainly help the art department flesh out the world, but it also means they've got to figure out what story they want to tell.
Probably the most film-ready story in Warcraft is the Tragedy of Arthas. You could do a movie about Arthas' downfall and it'd make for quite the experience. That said, as awesome as the Scourge is, Arthas' story is limited to one corner of Azeroth. You wouldn't be able to see Kalimdor in that story, and you'd limit your exposure to the non-human races.
If they choose to create new characters and just set it roughly where the game is at (which means that by the time the film comes out, it will be an expansion or two behind) you'd have to strike a delicate balance between showing off people like Varian or Thrall and fleshing out your dudes. Plus, if you were creating new villains for those people to fight, you'd be passing up a lot of pre-existing stuff.
3. Scope!
This ties into the story, but the thing about WoW is that there are a lot of major plots going on and not everyone gets to participate in all of them. If they use the pre-existing bad guys in the movie, will that suggest to the non-WoW audience that the main bad guys of WoW are the Scourge, the Old Gods, the Burning Legion?
4. Staying True!
Warcraft is very different from the Tolkien standard. The demons are not from hell, they're from a magical version of hyperspace. The undead are not standard zombies, they're an army organized with a single leader.
It would be a shame to have Warcraft generic-i-sized so that audiences could follow along. We need airships and nuclear-powered submarines along with our wizards and swordsmen. We need lanky green dudes in loincloths successfully fighting bulky blue guys with spaceships. That's just how Warcraft rolls.
If it winds up looking like a standard medieval setting, it won't be worth the trouble.
IN CONCLUSION
The movie's still a long way off, and could return to development hell. But if they do wind up making it, I genuinely hope they do pull it off. I've grown to like the setting quite a lot over the last six years, and with the talent they've got behind it, we could, theoretically, get a good film out of it.
But this is a video game adaptation, and there are going to be a whole lot of cooks in the kitchen. So if it winds up not-so-good, let's not take it too hard.
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