Duncan Jones To Direct WARCRAFT: THE MOVIE

Mega-popular massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft is getting the Hollywood treatment, and it'll be Duncan Jones behind the camera. Jones, the director of Moon and Source Code, is a very serious gamer himself, and has in the past said that Warcraft seems like the ideal game to movie translation.

World of Warcraft is just the latest iteration of the Warcraft universe, which sees a Tolkien-esque fantasy land known as Azeroth divided in a massive, ongoing war between the Alliance and the Horde. The Alliance is a group of all the boring fantasy races - humans, gnomes, dwarves, lame elves - while the Horde is made up of totally awesome races like Orcs, Trolls, Undead, Blood Elves and minotaur-like Tauren*. Over the years the ever-expanding universe has grown to include multiple planes of existence, outer space, time travel, werewolves, a race of kung-fu pandas and more. Warcraft offers an embarrassment of fantasy riches; it's like every fantasy concept thrown into a blender. 

There's a lot of Warcraft lore, but I suspect the script by Charles Leavitt (K-Pax... gulp!) will leave a lot of that behind. If I had to guess (and I'm just guessing here) the movie would involve Horde and Alilance characters coming together to battle a bigger threat against the backdrop of the endless war. 

You'll remember that Sam Raimi was attached to this film at one point, but he left to do Oz. Legendary, who is producing at Warner Bros, is moving ahead quickly, hoping to start shooting by this fall with a 2015 release eyed. This is a huge step up for Jones, and while I'm excited I hope this doesn't mean we've seen the last of his small, smart scifi movies. 

* Why yes, I do play Horde.