Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

I remember speaking very briefly with Thomas Tull about the idea of turning WORLD OF WARCRAFT into a film just before his company made the announcement that they were optioning the rights. It seemed to me like he knows full well that videogame movies are problematic at the very least, disastrous at their worst. He seems determined to make sure that WORLD OF WARCRAFT is all about story first.

This weekend, they made their first public presentation about the film at the BlizzCon, and there’s a pretty good report up online about it. To help augment that report, I managed to get a really nice, clean version of the piece of artwork they showed at the presentation, and I’ve included it here for you. Everywhere else it's shown up online, it's been a photo taken at the presentation, but this is a really nice high-res version, and if you click on it below, you'll be able to blow it up absurdly large and check out all the detail:

$100m budget
2009 release
Set 1 year prior to WoW
PG-13 content
from an Alliance Perspective
First Concept Art image

All the details here

“Today at BlizzCon 2007 we have heard our first solid and interesting information with regards to the Warcraft, or to some, the World of Warcraft Movie. This movie will be big, huge in fact, Thomas Tull (producer of 300) stated a budget of over $100m would be committed, with a projected 2009 release date.

The plot for the film will take place approximately a year before the start of World of Warcraft, including races you have played and lands you have wandered in, where lots of plot arcs are melded into a two and a half hour story. The film itself will revolve around a 'badass' new hero, with a theme towards conflict and culture - being a War Movie rather than a quest movie, from an Alliance's perspective.

I know you can’t really make any sort of decision about a film from one piece of concept art, but there’s something about the tone of this that I really like. I’ve never played the game (and considering how little free time I already have, I never will), but this intrigues me.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles