Warcraft, the 2016 American action fantasy film from director Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code) that brought one of Blizzard Entertainment’s biggest video game franchises to the silver screen, is one of the worst movies ever made, according to new statements that Bobby Kotick, the former CEO of Activision Blizzard, shared during a recent episode of the Grit Podcast.
“It took a lot of resources and distracted [Blizzard],” the American businessman explained, calling the project a “terrible” idea. “You think about all these people who make video games for a living, and now they have the chance to make a movie, and they’re helping with the casting, and they’re on the set, and it’s just a huge distraction. Our expansions were late, you know patches weren’t getting done on time, and…it was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.”
“As an Orc horde invades the planet Azeroth using a magic portal, a few human heroes and dissenting Orcs must attempt to stop the true evil behind this war,” reads a description of the film from Universal, a few 4K clips for which can be found below.
“I would say nothing is off the table,” World of Warcraft executive producer Holly Longdale said in an interview from November 2024 about the possibility of a new Warcraft movie being made. “We’re in a time of great optimism and chase for this next 20 years, and we’re being pretty open minded about all the opportunities that lie before us that we should consider. How to say something — without actually saying anything, when you talk about all those things.”
“Something that really always has to be considered is, there’s no slam dunk,” Xbox president of gaming content and studios Matt Booty added as part of a discussion about Microsoft’s interest in adapting some of its games into TV shows and films. “These things need to be thought through. They need to be thoughtful. For us, when we approach linear media — and we’ve had a lot of interest, which I think is great — it gets back to that point about games being mass market and interest in Hollywood, much as there has been interest over the last decade in comic books or Marvel and DC. So there’s plenty of interest for us.”
“It really has to start with the game team, and do they think that the game has got something that makes sense to take to linear. Not every game is an obvious choice to do that. So we always want to make sure that we start with the team and that we find a great partner,” Booty continued. “These things take time, and we just want to make sure we’ve got a good match between the game team and then the linear team that’s got a vision for what they want to make.”
Discussion (7 replies)
Join Discussion →Kotick is a tool.. Plain and simple. Was the movie a blockbuster?? No.. If you were a Warcraft fan, it was enjoyable.. I can understand if you had no clue of Warcraft lore, that you would have a hard time understanding the movie (as they didn't really spell everything out) but it was still enjoyable. Worst movie ever?? I don't think so!
Far... FAR from the worst movie ever. Kotick is just trying to trash the company he once worked for and make leaders there he doesn't like seem like idiots to others. I have ZERO respect for Kotick.
It was the first video-game based movie to gross over $400M. Too bad it cost more than that to make...
It did very well in China.
I had high hopes - Warcraft has a pretty rich lore and a lot of deep story lines to pull from. But the movie just kinda watered everything down and leaned way to far on Travis Fimmel, who can only really play one character type.
Yeah. Far far far from the worst movie. Probably one of the better video game movies - those just have a tendency to be absolutely awful when translated to the big screen.
Poor execution does not make the idea itself terrible.
But that would take a lot of time to tell, you would need to go Lotr type trilogy to do it decently and who wants to fund that?
Well if the first movie were actually good… there could have been more. Is what i was saying there
I went in expecting to completely hate it and ironically enjoyed it. Not the best by any means but far from the worst either. I've actually been thinking of re-watching it since I've seen it listed for free streaming somewhere recently.