The 'Warcraft' Film Is Coming ... and May Not Be Worth the Wait

The Warcraft film spent a long time in development hell, but public progress started being made when Duncan Jones of Moon and Source Code was announced as director. It’s currently scheduled for release on June 10th, 2016. After a decade of waiting, the trailer was revealed at BlizzCon today.

With a bunch of games and expansions providing content to choose from, the initial Orc invasion of Human lands — from the first Warcraft game — seems both an obvious and uncreative choice. Unfortunately, that shows in the trailer: The human characters seem like undifferentiated white guys with facial hair, while the orcs exhibit no particular personality other than an argument about co-existence.

Perhaps most disappointing: the music in the trailer sounds utterly generic, for a game series where so much of its feeling comes from memorable music. In some ways, this is what fans have feared for a while now.

To be fair, advertising a film like this, needing to appease a legion of superfans as well as appeal to a mass audience. A relatively personality-free trailer coming out of that compromise, even if the film is good, is entirely possible. (Also, generic placeholder music often finds its way into trailers.) And there were some neat bits, like the overhead shots of human towns looking like a scene from the Warcraft strategy games. But as a first deeper look at the Warcraft movie, this feels like a disappointment.