How do you know what a mainstream audience can absorb? Warcraft is robust with mythology and mystical language. There are older women who know nothing about Warcraft, large numbers of them, who love the movie. And pretty much all of these demographics evenly are split between people who know the game and people who know nothing about the game. There are women, young and old, who like it. There are young men and old men who like it. There is no clear and defined group of people who likes Warcraft. It's been really unusual and challenging to parse exactly what makes the film work for certain audiences. I think that's what gave it an awful lot more momentum and allowed me to convince the studio that if they wanted to make a movie based on Warcraft, this was the way that both I and Blizzard thought it needed to be. What I pitched was so more in sync with what the game's company hoped the movie could be after many years of trying to make the movie. Obviously, Blizzard, makes the game, makes vast amounts of very well-earned money on its games, so it was important that whatever we did didn't pollute them. There were a lot of gravitational pulls in Warcraft in particular, even more than a standard studio movie. I was fortunate that I was able to convince the powers that be that that was the right thing to do. I think being able to make the orcs more human, up their screen time, and balance the audience empathy for those orc characters was all something that felt absolutely crucial to me. As someone who is familiar with the game, it really mattered to me that that element of it was accurate. When I got involved there was an approach to the film which was more "humans are the heroes and the invading orcs were the bad guys." It didn't ring true to me as to what the Warcraft game is. To use your freighter metaphor: what was the biggest turn you made on Warcraft? When you're making an independent film it's more like you're driving a motorboat. If you want to make a turn it's going to take a lot of effort. When you make a studio film it's a bit like you're the captain of an oil tanker. It's all about the decision-making process. , from start to finish, will be one year. How much of your life did you invest into Warcraft? So why was Warcraft one critic's "amusing and sometimes visually arresting absurdity" and another's " Battlefield Earth of the 21st Century"? I asked Jones to take one more look back to understand if the CGI-heavy epic was destined for what it became: the most underrated movie of the summer. The movie version blows past the ingrained images like electricity out of a mage's fingertips, not original, glowing vibrantly in a sterilized summer season. Once upon a time, the Warcraft game designers may have harvested J.R.R. Jones authentically translates video-game action to the screen, owning the color, the craziness, and the cacophony. The chronicles of Durotan the orc warrior, Anduin the human knight, Medivh the conjuring wizard, Garona the lethal hybrid, and Gul'dan the villainous orc warlock (warlorc?) pulsate like the pages of a flip book. But Jones is marching on he phones me from Berlin where he's location scouting for the Blade Runner-esque Mute, which sounds more like a spirit journey than a fourth feature. Add the birth of his first kid, just days after the movie's premiere, and the death of his father, David Bowie, back in January, and that's a lot of life to shoulder. Earlier this summer, critics scorned Warcraft, the Moon and Source Code director's foray into mega-budget video-game adaptations, while US audiences looked the other way - the movie made a meager $47 million in the States (despite breaking box-office records around the world).
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