In talks with MTV, Sam Raimi has revealed that “Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan” writer Robert Rodat will be pen­ning the World of War­craft movie adap­ta­tion. The sto­ry­line will be an orig­i­nal effort, set in the War­craft uni­verse but not fol­low­ing the Lich King book (which had been rumored as a subtitle).

“We would choose… some­thing that encom­passes lands and char­ac­ters and sto­ry­lines, and we would be true to it. But our story may or may not be about one of those cen­tral characters.”

“We want to be really faith­ful to the game. We would have our writer, Robert Rodat, really craft an orig­i­nal story within that world that feels like a ‘World of War­Craft’ adven­ture. Only obvi­ously it’s very dif­fer­ent ’cause it’s expanded and trans­lated into the world of a motion picture.”

“[The hope is to prop­erly cap­ture] the Horde and the Alliance and the mythol­ogy that takes place in the game, and the arche­types that the game presents. I think we would try and find touch­stones within the game to make it accu­rate and true and choose one or some of the lands that are por­trayed in the game with as much accu­racy and authen­tic­ity as possible.”

MTV are report­ing that the movie adap­ta­tion of War­craft now appears to have a title, ‘War­craft: The Rise Of The Lich King’. The title falls in-line with a recently released NY Times best-selling book, “Arthas: Rise of the Lich King”. How­ever, they cite the source of this infor­ma­tion to be the unre­li­able and socially pow­ered IMDB​.com, which has since removed the phrase.

If we are to believe the sub­ti­tle and that the movie will fol­low in the foot­steps of the book, then the plot would revolve around Arthas Menethil,

a once-noble prince and war­rior who becomes a fear­some tyrant known as the Lich King.

I’d take this with a big grain of salt and instead wait for some offi­cial word.

Gary Whitta (screen­writer [Futu­rama episodes, Book of Eli, Live action Akira], author and game designer) has revealed that over the past two years he has been fer­vently work­ing, in secret, on the World of War­craft movie adap­ta­tion. How­ever, since Raimi has come on board, the film’s direc­tion has changed and Whitta is no longer involved. Whitta explains,

I had actu­ally been work­ing on this for the past two years. Had to keep it under wraps at the time but it doesn’t really mat­ter now.

I worked very closely with Leg­endary and Bliz­zard to come up with a screen­play that dis­tilled the sprawl­ing War­craft mythol­ogy into a nar­ra­tive that was eas­ily acces­si­ble to the non-player, and every­one was really pleased with the results — I per­son­ally thought my last draft of the script in par­tic­u­lar was really kick-ass and did a good job of intro­duc­ing the War­craft world to non-players while also sat­is­fy­ing hard­core play­ers who knew every nook and cranny of the uni­verse. When Sam expressed inter­est in the prop­erty, how­ever, he had his own pretty spe­cific vision of what he wanted to do story-wise so that’s the ver­sion they’re now pur­su­ing. I’m no longer involved but I wish them all the best with it; so far as I’m con­cerned Raimi is the best pos­si­ble direc­tor for this.

Thanks Márton Gazdig.

Chris Met­zen, Blizzard’s VP of Cre­ative Devel­op­ment, has spo­ken with Game­Spy about the lat­est WOW Movie devel­op­ments — mainly Sam Raimi as direc­tor of the big screen adap­ta­tion. He dis­cusses Raimi’s ded­i­ca­tion to cre­at­ing faith­ful adap­ta­tions (he didn’t have full cre­ative con­trol in Spider-man 3) and his excite­ment at see­ing famil­iar places and char­ac­ters brought to the big screen.

Game­Spy: You’ve just made the big announce­ment that Sam Raimi will be direct­ing the War­craft movie. You’re co-producing, so what are your thoughts on the announcement?

Chris Met­zen: We’re all very, very excited about the announce­ment. We waited a long time to announce a direc­tor. We’ve been with Leg­endary for a num­ber of years and we’ve jammed a lot of ideas, and we’ve waited for the right per­son­al­i­ties, the right chem­istry to come together. We’re really, really stoked that it finally has. It’s pretty sur­real that we’ve finally made the announce­ment. It’s finally like, “It’s on, it’s offi­cial, here we go.” We’re just stoked to get it going and see this thing start­ing to take shape.

Game­Spy: Was Sam Raimi one of the orig­i­nally tar­geted directors?

Chris Met­zen: We talked about a lot of dif­fer­ent peo­ple, and cer­tainly his name was one of the first we had talked about. We’re all huge “Spider-Man” fans, and all of his hor­ror con­tent, like “Army of Dark­ness” is one of my per­sonal favorites. Sam’s one of those guys who came out swing­ing with “Spider-Man,” in terms of han­dling the licensed prod­uct and all the geeky fan­fare. The pas­sion of fan­dom, he really trans­lated that into some­thing that every­one could love, and had a lot of heart. And those were really impor­tant com­po­nents for us, in terms of trans­lat­ing a license, in build­ing a cin­e­matic expe­ri­ence that speaks to the license, but really sings to every­body. That was really, really impor­tant to us, so he was the per­fect partner.

[…]

Game­Spy: The fan base is rely­ing on you to ensure that the movie stays true to War­craft. Are you pre­pared to say that it will be?

Chris Met­zen: Absolutely! Absolutely.

Game­Spy: What most excites you about co-producing the movie?

Chris Met­zen: The thing that would excite me most is just that it trans­lates boldly. That it feels like a fan expe­ri­ence, and that a cou­ple years from now, you sit down in a the­ater and you’re like, “They did it. They got it. That feels gen­uine.” It may not be about your Level 12 Night Elf Hunter, specif­i­cally, but all the famil­iar­ity — the locales, the places, the char­ac­ters, the sto­ry­lines — it all feels con­tigu­ous and one-to-one with your expec­ta­tions. That’s my great hope.

The World of War­craft movie is offi­cially on the move, after many months of stag­na­tion we thought the project may have died a quiet death. How­ever, behind the scenes it seems there were some excit­ing dis­cus­sions and today, two years since the ini­tial announce­ment, Bliz­zard and Leg­endary pic­tures have named their direc­tor, one Sam Raimi.

Raimi has directed both the Spider-man and Evil Dead series, and may be a per­fect choice, as some­one that can take a huge wealth of core mate­r­ial (with a strong fan fol­low­ing) and deliver some­thing phenomenal.

Raimi is cur­rently set to direct Spider-man 4 which is due for release in 2011, pro­duc­tion hasn’t yet started on the fourth movie, which gives the World of War­craft movie a release date, at the ear­li­est, some­time in 2012. (Assum­ing Spider-man 4 begins early next year, takes one year to com­plete and meets its release date, and that the WOW movie has a sim­i­lar schedule).

Press release

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – July 22, 2009 — Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment, Inc. and Leg­endary Pic­tures announced today that Sam Raimi has signed on to direct the eagerly-anticipated major motion pic­ture based on Bliz­zard Entertainment®’s award-winning War­craft® uni­verse. Raimi has, in the course of his career, clearly demon­strated a genius for devel­op­ing and adapt­ing exist­ing fic­tional uni­verses for main­stream audi­ences while stay­ing true to the spirit of the orig­i­nal con­tent.
Raimi directed the Spider-Man tril­ogy, which has bro­ken box-office records around the world and gar­nered five Acad­emy Award® nom­i­na­tions. Known for his imag­i­na­tive film­mak­ing style, richly drawn char­ac­ters and off­beat humor, Raimi wrote and directed the cult clas­sic, The Evil Dead and pro­duced 30 Days Of Night. He most recently wrote and directed the super­nat­ural thriller, Drag Me To Hell.

“At its core, War­craft is a fan­tas­tic, action-packed story,” said Raimi. “I am thrilled to work with such a dyna­mite pro­duc­tion team to bring this project to the big screen.”

Charles Roven’s pro­duc­ing tal­ents were recently seen with last summer’s block­buster The Dark Knight, which grossed in excess of $1 bil­lion, was nom­i­nated for eight Acad­emy Awards® and won two. His body of work also includes the widely acclaimed Bat­man Begins and the sci-fi clas­sic 12 Mon­keys. Roven, with Atlas pro­duc­ing part­ner Alex Gart­ner, will be pro­duc­ing with Leg­endary Pic­tures CEO Thomas Tull, Legendary’s Chief Cre­ative Offi­cer Jon Jashni, Raimi and Raimi’s pro­duc­ing part­ner Joshua Donen. Raimi’s part­ner, Robert Tapert, will be an Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer and Bliz­zard Entertainment’s Senior Vice Pres­i­dent of Cre­ative Devel­op­ment, Chris Met­zen, a Co-Producer.

“Part­ner­ing with Sam Raimi exem­pli­fies Legendary’s man­date of mar­ry­ing the high­est qual­ity intel­lec­tual prop­erty to world-class film­mak­ers” said Legendary’s Tull. “Sam’s pas­sion for ‘War­craft’ is unde­ni­able and we know that he will cre­ate an incred­i­ble film wor­thy of Blizzard’s phe­nom­e­nal fran­chise. We look for­ward to col­lab­o­rat­ing with our part­ners at Warner Bros. and con­tin­u­ing our suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ship with Chuck in bring­ing this rich new world to the screen.”

“Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment and Leg­endary Pic­tures have a shared vision for this film and we searched at length to find the very best direc­tor to bring that vision to life,” said Paul Sams, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment. “From our first con­ver­sa­tion with Sam, we could tell he was the per­fect choice. Sam knows how to simul­ta­ne­ously sat­isfy the enthu­si­asts and the main­stream audi­ence that might be expe­ri­enc­ing that con­tent for the first time. We’re look­ing for­ward to work­ing with him to achieve that here.”

It appears that Uwe Boll applied to Bliz­zard for the role of direc­tor in the World of War­craft movie. Shock hor­ror I hear you all cry, espe­cially when such an astound­ingly bad direc­tor has these views about mak­ing a faith­ful adaptation:

“You go for it, to please the game fans, but on the other hand if you have the hard core gamers, they live in their own world. And you can­not ful­fill their ideas from a video game based movie, it’s impos­si­ble. And to be hon­est, the real gamers are the typ­i­cal down­load guys, right? They don’t pay any­thing for movies, because they ille­gally down­load the movies. So why I should please these guys? I need the nor­mal audience.”

In the MTV arti­cle, Boll goes on to say that he spoke with Bliz­zard about helm­ing the WoW movie:

“I got in con­tact with Paul Sams of Bliz­zard, and he said, ‘We will not sell the movie rights, not to you…especially not to you. Because it’s such a big online game suc­cess, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongo­ing income, what the com­pany has with it.”

Good news all round I say! Here, here, let’s move on to some good poten­tial directors…

A blog net­work deliv­er­ing the lat­est news updates on a range of in-production block­buster movies.

Well, Aint it Cool’s Mori­arty posted this. It is a 1.5mb, 4000 x 2358 pixel mam­moth. Enjoy.