Warcraft Trailer Premiering Friday

The long-awaited trailer to the Warcraft movie will be premiering on Friday.

I've talked about this before, but here's my basic take on the thing: I love the Warcraft story and universe (though I'll be honest and say that I'm way more curious to see the story of Arthas on screen - if the movie's successful maybe we will.) But I also weigh this against the fact that video game movies have pretty much only ever made it to mediocre in terms of quality. Why is that? Well, there are tons of factors. One is that studios have often treated games with disdain - the Mario Bros. movie really set a tone here, where the filmmakers had apparently been wanting to make a movie about a dystopian city with brutalist architecture and then just stapled some Mario branding onto it and somehow wrangled three good actors into it.

Now, thankfully it doesn't look like that will be the case here. Duncan Jones played World of Warcraft, and he's familiar with the universe enough that he advocated for making the Orcs more relatable. One of Warcraft's greatest strengths as a setting is the idea that the Orcs are not inherently evil (something the whole Garrosh/Iron Horde plot kind of undermined.) Rather than focus entirely on the Kingdom of Stormwind fighting off an outside threat, the movie will spend a lot of time with Durotan as he watches his people sink into corruption.

But I do think there are other problems that one often encounters when adapting a game. Games are all about action. Even RPGs, which are typically the most story-driven game experiences, still focus a whole lot more on action than story. A movie can do that, sure, but the most action-packed movies still usually have a larger story-to-action ratio than your typical game. (Granted, a really good action movie or action-oriented movie will find clever ways to tell the story through the action, which is also what really good games do.)

Honestly, I feel similarly about this movie as I do about the new Star Wars. I really want it to be good, but I'm wary. A lot of things can go wrong and make a movie fail, and when you have a property that's as high-profile as either of these, there are going to be a lot of cooks in the kitchen, which can result in some really big problems.

Basically, my checklist for this movie is:

Let it be fun, with the trademark Warcraft silliness to provide levity
Let the characters have multiple dimensions
Let it be faithful enough to make it familiar, but know when to make economical changes
Let it hint at the larger Warcraft universe without feeling like an incomplete story
Let it not bite off more than it can chew

Fingers crossed!