Skip to main content

Warcraft movie slips back to summer 2016

warcraft movie june delay orc
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Warcraft, the film adaptation of Blizzard Entertainment’s blockbuster fantasy game franchise, has been pushed back from its planned release date of March 11, 2016, to a summer release on June 10, Variety reports. Some fans may be disappointed that they will have to wait an additional three months for all the steamy, orc-on-human action, but what’s a few more months after two years of post-production? Moreover, director Duncan Jones (Moon) pointed out on Twitter that the delay is a good thing, because it means Universal sees the film as a potential summer blockbuster.

Got good news & bad news. Uni have decided Warcraft deserves to be a summer flick. Yay! Bad news, that means we have to wait till June 2016!

— Duncan Jones (@ManMadeMoon) April 24, 2015

Warcraft will dive deep into the lore of Blizzard’s fantasy franchise. The world of Azeroth is best known as the setting for World of Warcraft, Blizzard’s genre-defining massively multiplayer online roleplaying game that took the world by storm in 2004. The characters and stories in the film, however, were first introduced in the 90s through Blizzard’s Warcraft series of three real-time strategy games.

Recommended Videos

It is a world of high fantasy, in the post-Tolkien vein, featuring the likes of humans, elves, dwarves, and orcs. The conflict between orcs and humans is central to Warcraft’s fiction, eventually expanding to the multi-racial factions of Horde vs. Alliance that divides World of Warcraft‘s player population. To the delight of longtime fans, the film’s action will be set during the events of the first two games, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, when the orcs and humans first came into contact and waged two wars against each other, while greater, demonic threats loomed in the background.

The Warcraft film is no stranger to delays. The project was first announced way back in 2006, when the game was young and rapidly growing. It was another three years before Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead) was tapped to direct the film in 2009. Raimi left the project in 2012 in order to direct Oz: The Great and Powerful, by his own admission. Duncan Jones signed on to direct in 2013. Jones made a big splash with imaginative and low-budget Moon and Source Code. A big budget fantasy epic is a decidedly different beast, so fans of both Warcraft and Jones’ work are eager to see how that creativity will translate to a bigger canvas.

Will Fulton
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…
8 ‘shocking’ modern movie twists that everyone saw coming, ranked
A man fires a flamethrower at a girl in a pool in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Whenever a plot twist occurs in a film, it can either make or break the story for its audience. Some classic movies like Psycho and Planet of the Apes and more recent movies like 2022's Nope have presented iconic twists that nobody could have dreamed of upon release, while others did not have as much success in defying viewers' expectations.

Such predictable plot twists don't necessarily ruin the story, but if the filmmaker's goal was to trick everyone watching and blow them all away, these eight movies didn't exactly fool their audience.

Read more
Is Dune 2 the next Empire Strikes Back? Here’s what the critics are saying
Paul walks in the desert in Dune: Part Two.

In the realm of sci-fi, it's a rare sequel that outshines its predecessor. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan had it easy, because Star Trek: The Motion Picture was such a slog by comparison. A true showing of greatness was the way that The Empire Strikes Back somehow managed to improve upon the original Star Wars, one of the most groundbreaking sci-fi films ever made. And now, the early response to Dune: Part Two suggests that Denis Villeneuve's follow-up to Dune may have pulled off the trick of a sci-fi sequel that outshines the original film.

Is Dune 2 the next Empire Strikes Back? Fans will get to decide for themselves soon enough. But the first reviews are in, and Dune: Part Two is currently sitting on a 97% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Below, we've assembled a selection from the Dune: Part Two reviews and the initial reactions from some of the most prominent online film critics. And almost all of them are very positive.
Here's what the critics are saying

Read more
Warcraft and Diablo devs reveal the focus of Phil Spencer’s Blizzard visit
Phil Spencer at BlizzCon 2023. He's presenting on a stage in a black jacket.

Microsoft completed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October, and shortly thereafter, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer confirmed on the Official Xbox Podcast that he was going to visit Activision Blizzard studios in the coming weeks. Spencer did so prior to BlizzCon 2023, where he also ended up making an appearance during the Opening Ceremony to reaffirm Xbox's commitment to support all of Blizzard's major franchises. To get a better idea of what Spencer's studio visit and BlizzCon appearance felt like for Blizzard developers, we asked John Hight, Warcraft franchise general manager, and Rod Fergusson, Diablo general manager, about the experience.

"They actually came out a couple of weeks ago, Phil and a lot of his leadership team. What was nice about it was we had prepared all of these PowerPoints and stuff, but they just wanted to meet the teams," Hight told Digital Trends. "They had lunch out in our patio, the cafe. We had hundreds of employees and Phil made himself available just to talk to people. He just wanted to see some of the games and meet some of the people, so we gave him a demo of one of the areas in The War Within for a while, and then we had [game designer] Tom [Chilton] demo Warcraft Rumble. It was fun because we started to go through introductions and I said ‘Clearly you’re having fun playing the game, you can tune out and just play that.' They’ve been very supportive. I think they’re excited by the fact that, especially with Warcraft, we have a diversity of games and platforms that we’re building for.”

Read more