Monday, August 10, 2015

The Proper Way To Do A "World of Warcraft" Movie: Special 1993 Edition.

Since I couldn't really fit this all into my previous post and didn't feel that it was the right place for it, I decided that it would work better as a stand alone / accompanying post to the above/below that I posted earlier about my thoughts on the Warcraft film.  And yes, I know that World of Warcraft wasn't released until 2004, but it'll work better this way.  Trust me.

What I feared the movie would be when it was (was it ever?) a World of Warcraft film, was that it seemed like it would have come out of an early 1990's executive's brain on what the popular masses wanted from a movie based on a video game.  Product placements by Mt. Dew, Funyuns and NoDoz aside, the only way I could envision this WoW movie happening was a sad abomination with a misguided target audience.  Kids play video games, so let's market it towards kids, right?

I thought the film would be focused on a kid (probably a Google image searches idea of a video game dork. . yeah, that's about right) who plays WoW and outside of him attending public high school, has very little interaction with other people.  Maybe he sees his family during dinner and only for a few minutes at breakfast.  The rest of the time, let's call him Carl, spends in his room playing WoW.

At school, Carl has been having problems with other kids, specifically a group of goths (because stereotyping "jocks" would be inappropriate) lead by a kid named Dennis who likes to be called Dark.  Dark teases Carl about him playing WoW to the point where Carl is experiencing tell tale signs of depression and developing what his concerned yet constantly absent parents think is agoraphobia.  So basically, Carl is being bullied by Dark because Dark has been bullied in the past (revealed later).

At home one night, maybe the Friday night of the senior prom, Carl is playing WoW when Dark attempts to break into Carl's room for the sole purpose of wrecking his computer, preventing him from ever playing his "lame-ass video games ever again!"  Then something straight out of Weird Science happens and the two boys are pulled/sucked into the World of Warcraft game.  

Through a series of predictable events, Carl sides with the forces of Lordaeron (or was is Azeroth?) and Dark sides with the Horde (after Dark accepts the fact that he's in a video game).  Both kids learn important things about themselves (what, I don't rightly know).  Leading up to the final battle, Dark realizes that he's sided with the wrong side and defects to the good side.  Dark and Carl are instrumental (Dark, because he knows the plans of the evil dudes and Carl because he's the main character) in foiling the plans of the Horde in taking over the kingdom; let's say they're battlefield generals.  At some point during Dark's redemption it is revealed that Dark played WoW too, but only during its first year and stopped because he too was bullied about playing video games, and the two boys become friends/comrades in arms.

A massive CGI battle ensues.  They manage to help win the battle and are transported  during the celebration feast back (how?) into the real world, with all of the life lessons they learned during their (week/month/season/year-long?) ordeal to find that no time had passed in the real world.  Maybe one (or both) of them still has some token that they were able to bring back from the WoW realm into the real world.

The next time they see each other at school, there's no mocking on Dark's part and the two give a casual nod, all in slow motion as maybe a track by AC/DC plays over the credits.

I probably should have written screenplays back in the 80s, if I hadn't been, you know born in the beginning of the 80s.  But this was one of the few ways I thought a studio would end up doing a World of Warcraft film.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

2 comments:

  1. If it was not at all clear, I think this would be a terrible idea for a movie, but the plot reminded me of a film that could be found in the 1990s. In case this point did not come across well enough, I do not endorse the making of the movie that I have outlined here. I think we're clear now.

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