Random Observations – Is Raimi Ready?
As we all know by now, if you read the Internet, Sam Raimi, the director of the past 3 Spider-Man movies and Evil Dead and most recently Drag me to Hell, has parted ways with Sony Pictures and left the Spider-Man franchise.
A few months ago it was announced that after Raimi had finished Spider-Man 4 that his next movie would be the epic game to movie translation, World of Warcraft. Now with the Spider-Man movie off of his radar will WoW be his next movie? I’m not holding my breath.
This movie after first being announced at the 1st BlizzCon went almost 2 years with no info about it. Still to this point nothing new on a story has been released, no new concept art or casting or even shooting locations. We just had a director announced a few months ago and that he wasn’t going to start for at least 2 years until Spider-Man was down. So what does that put us at in terms of years since this movie was first announced 6 years (including if Raimi was still on Spider-Man). Then two more years on top of that two actually shoot it and then edit it.
So either now he has to kick it into high gear to get this ball rolling or something is going to happen that’s not what fans want to hear.
My feelings are that this movie won’t get made.
There are to many negative strikes on this movie and the first one is the budget. When you think of Azeroth you might as well be thinking Pandora from Avatar. There terrain on Azeroth isn’t very friendly to what we have on earth unless you base the whole movie in Elwynn Forest and Orgimmar and use a real forest and maybe something in the mid-west of orange-ish rock. Almost all of the races on the horde would have to be digital to get the size of the race correct. That’s not even taking into account the undead which are bones more or less. With and I hate to use Avatar as a standard but with it’s CGI characters it set a bar and WoW would look ridiculous if you had people in costumes running around. So, lots of CGI and expenses.
Raimi I don’t think was prepared for this to just fall in his lap like this and is going to be scrambling now that it’s next on his list and honestly may not be ready to tackle this monster. I’m betting he walks from the project.
With no story, that we know of, even being close to finished how are studios supposed to budget, green light and cast this monster? If Raimi walks, the only way a studio is going to produce this movie is with a credible director who can manage a big budget and get it done on time. That said this will most likely turn into a Michael Bay style film and will be all action and effects and less story, if it gets that far.
I’m sure a lot of you are keeping your fingers crossed for this and honestly, so am I. It’s just I don’t have good feelings about it. I got my hopes up for Halo and that fell apart because the studios had no faith in Neil Blomkamp, and yet he made District 9 and was nominated for a Golden Globe for best director. Studios really mess things up. (I’m looking at you NBC Universal)
I’m curious as to how all of you feel. Do you think we will actually see the WoW film in the next 2 years?
Post some comments so other can see instead of sending me email….get a discussion going.
Later,
Mike aka Valaar
