Trivia / Warcraft (2016)

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• Acting for Two: Toby Kebbell plays both Durotan and Antonidas.
• Actor-Inspired Element: Duncan Jones has explained that Lothar loses his boots in his fight with the clay golem because Travis Fimmel Prefers Going Barefoot, prompting Jones to come up with a reason for him to go barefoot on set.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: One of the reasons Daniel Wu took the role as Gul'dan is because his wife plays World of Warcraft.
  Daniel Wu: Yeah, Gul’dan is an iconic character of the game^note Gul'dan was reintroduced in grand fashion via an alternate version as a major antagonist in the Expansion Pack Warlords of Draenor back then and it’s a daunting task because there are so many people who have their own version of who these characters are from playing the game and I know that because (and I also have to thank my wife because she plays the game and she played for many, many years and she’s actually the reason why I did the film). Of course I did it for Duncan, this amazing cast and all that — but really it’s to get into my wife’s good grace because she’s been playing the game for many, many years.
• Box Office Bomb: The film tanked in the United States (Budget: $160 million - Domestic box office: $47 million). However, it made a whopping $156 million during its Chinese opening weekend, and grossed over $433 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing movie to be based on a video game worlwide at the time. Given that Legendary Pictures is now co-owned by a Chinese company, they get to keep a bigger share of the Chinese ticket sales than typical "foreign-made" movies.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Many critics and bloggers without much knowledge of the Warcraft franchise were quick to say the film is "an adaptation of the MMORPG World of Warcraft". While the film does borrow to WoW for aesthetic and Worldbuilding purposes, it adapts the storyline of the 1994 RTS that started the franchise and not any storyline from WoW, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.
• Executive Meddling: Duncan Jones revealed in interviews that the theatrical cut is a full 40 minutes shorter than his original cut.
• Fake American: Travis Fimmell is Australian and uses an American accent to play Lothar. Everyone else however keeps their natural accents, Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga remaining British and Irish respectively.
• God-Created Canon Foreigner: Many of the characters count as this, as long as we're only comparing to Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (the specific game that is being adapted). Garona, Blackhand, Lothar, Llane, and Medivh, are the only characters that had appeared and were actually named in the original game. Most of the other characters used in the movie only appeared in the second game or its expansion at the earliest. The likes of Moroes didn't appear until The Last Guardian, meanwhile.
• In Memoriam: The film is dedicated to the memory of David Bowie, who was the father of director Duncan Jones.
• Release Date Change: The film was going to be released in December 2015 but was pushed back to June 2016 to avoid facing the release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.
• Saved from Development Hell: Talk of an adaptation started back in 2006, with the release eventually happening a decade later. The plot flip-flopped between being about the First War to being set just prior to World of Warcraft (the reason cited being that the popularity of the franchise was from the MMO, not the RTS games). Sam Raimi was originally supposed to direct but the project was put off so that Raimi could focus on other films. He eventually left, citing mismanagement on Blizzard's part who had vetoed most of his pre-production work (he pitched an idea whose main character he described as an "anti-Thrall", but Blizzard didn't want such an Alliance-centric story and wanted to maintain their own heroic version of the orcs). It was not until 2013 that the movie was finally Saved from Development Hell.
• Stillborn Franchise: The movie was meant to begin a film franchise, but the poor box office numbers outside China and co-producer Legendary Pictures leaving Universal two years later don't seem to indicate that a sequel is likely to see the light of day.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Uwe Boll tried to get the rights to make a Warcraft film in the 2000s, but Blizzard thankfully shot him down with prejudice: according to Boll, they told him "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."
  • The other director besides Boll who tried to get attached to this film was Sam Raimi, but after being on it for a while, he was finally replaced with Jones after the latter voiced displeasure with Raimi allegedly doing a "humans are the good guys, orcs are the bad guys".
  • Colin Farrell was approached to play King Llane, met with the director and read the script. Eventually Dominic Cooper was cast instead. At one point, Johnny Depp was interested in starring.

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