Warcraft Movie Details

At Blizzcon's Warcraft Movie panel, we learned a few details about the upcoming film, and were even able to get our first look at one of the Orc characters, Orgrim Doomhammer, and we were able to find out about the main cast.

As I believe had already been talked about, Warcraft will take place during the first war, and the film will split the focus between the humans and the orcs, with Lothar serving as the primary human protagonist and Durotan serving as the primary orc one. The orcs will be Gollum-style cgi characters, with the orcish members of the cast donning mocap suits, physically acting on the sets but being replaced digitally with their orc counterparts. The exception here is Garona, who was shot live-action. The humans will of course be live action as well.

They talked a bit about how they built a portion of Stormwind as a set (Chris Metzen mentioned how awesome it was to be able to walk through Stormwind's Trade District,) and how the Orc actors had done a lot of movement work to get their Orcish gait and physicality.

Here's the cast they announced:

Lothar: Travis Fimmel
Durotan: Toby Kebbell
Medivh: Ben Foster
Gul'dan: Daniel Wu
Lady Taria: Ruth Negga
Orgrim: Robert Kazinsky
Llane: Dominic Cooper
Blackhand: Clancy Brown
Khadgar: Ben Schnitzer
Garona: Paula Patton

I'll confess I'm not terribly familiar with most of these actors, though I've been a big fan of Clancy Brown ever since the HBO show Carnivale. The only thing that's shocking to me about his casting is that he isn't Gul'dan.

Also, I don't remember Lady Taria, but I sure as hell think there's room for more female characters in that cast, so I'm totally ok with it if they invented one to add in there.

I do recall seeing some concept art related to Dalaran, and it seems that they are talking about the "Alliance" as part of the universe of the film, which, as a lore stickler, doesn't quite fit (as the Alliance didn't begin until the Second War,) but it's a relatively minor quibble (one could imagine something akin to the Alliance of Lordaeron existing as part of the Troll Wars.) I don't know if we're likely to see any of the other races of Azeroth, but I can understand wanting to start off with a fairly self-contained narrative for the first film.

The film is due to come out in March of 2016.