Could the "Warcraft" movie completely over-shadow the "D&D" movie?

[Umbran]

A Planescape or Spelljammer movie could be done almost completely in green screen, which could actually serve to greatly reduce costs.

And emotional impact. Moviemakers are finding that the more they use CGI backgrounds, the less the audience invests in the movie. It sounds weird, but apparently while we are willing to accept a little unreality in a fantastic foreground character, when you make the background world CGI, we notice and suspend our disbelief less. This may explain why, over the past decade or so, as expenditure on CGI effects has gone up, our enjoyment of the movies has generally dropped.

 

[Ryujin]

And emotional impact. Moviemakers are finding that the more they use CGI backgrounds, the less the audience invests in the movie. It sounds weird, but apparently while we are willing to accept a little unreality in a fantastic foreground character, when you make the background world CGI, we notice and suspend our disbelief less. This may explain why, over the past decade or so, as expenditure on CGI effects has gone up, our enjoyment of the movies has generally dropped.

It's not that weird, since the more unreal something reflects our own experience the less we can immerse ourselves in it, but there are ways to mitigate against that. Science fiction movies seem to do pretty well with green screen, because they aren't a reflection of our real world experience.

There are other reasons why our enjoyment of CGI has gone down. A big one is the higher the resolution of the image, the more we notice the flaws. We're also expecting more, since every stinking movie seems to need to one-up what came before. We've become jaded over things that would have had our parents drooling in the theatres.

 

[amerigoV]

On the emotional impact - I think the Red Letter Media review of the Star Wars Prequels hit the nail on the head - if the background is all fake, its hard for the actors to really "interact" in that scene. Since they have few points of references, they do not react "naturally" to the environment that gets painted onto them.

For example, the chestburster scene in Alien worked wonderfully because the actors did not know exactly what was going to happen and it was a physical scene. The splashing of (fake, I hope) blood resulted in real reactions, including the scream and disgust of the actors. You could easily replicate that scene in CGI these days, but odds are the reactions would be stiff and we would pick up on it.

Star Wars Ep1-3 had a lot of walking and talking through scenery that was stiff. The actors were not interacting with the scene and it showed.

 

[tomBitonti]

While I might rather like a Planescape based movie, I can't see such a movie being made.

Actually, a semi-episodic show based on Sigil (The City of Doors) could be awesome.

As could a serialization of GDQ (the Giants, Drow, Demonweb modules). Or a horror based series that involved Illithid. Brain eating tentacle monsters which can be created by implantating a parasite in your friend's brain seems ideal for horror.

Something combining Drow, Drittzt, and Faerun seems most likely. Although, I have a hard time seeing how that would work in comparison to what is being done nowadays, because the tropes seem too adolescent, and the characters too thinly defined.

Thx!

TomB

 

[collin]

As already mentioned here, there should not be a problem with Warcraft and the new D&D movie competing against each other since they will probably come out 2-3 years apart. However, if Warcraft is bad, then that will likely affect the D&D film since it will not be long enough between release dates to get the bad-taste out of the mouths of the general movie-going audience. So if you want people to go see the D&D film, you first better hope they go see and like the Warcraft film.

 

[Tonguez]

I was going to go with "Batman v Superman" following "Avengers: Age of Ultron", but otherwise make the same point.

In both the case of Star Trek vs Star Wars and these superhero outings they don't really compare as they are entirely different genres and are established as different in the general public. Star Trek is Sci Fi whereas people know Star Wars has as much "science" as Mad Max. In the Avengers you have the Ensemble of Enhanced Heroes whereas Batman/Supes features Stand alone "Gods" - I have no doubt that the next Avengers movie will be compared to Justice League however.

Warcraft as a war between humans and orcs will be compared to LoTR, although having a focus on the Orcs side of things could be interesting. DnD is big enough in scope to not overlap too - so lets hope they don't focus on Orcs with a War setting.

 

[Jester David]

Yeah, the D&D movie will come around when Warcraft 2 hits the silver screen.

That'd certainly be a worry. It takes a couple years to get a movie going so D&D would be 2018 at the earliest, which would be about the time of a Warcraft sequel, IF that movie ends up doing well.

But, really, for this to be an issue the D&D movie still has to be made and not sit in development hell and not be terrible.

 

[delericho]

Star Trek is Sci Fi whereas people know Star Wars has as much "science" as Mad Max.

In fairness, the recent Star Trek films have had as much "science" as Mad Max, too.

In the Avengers you have the Ensemble of Enhanced Heroes whereas Batman/Supes features Stand alone "Gods" - I have no doubt that the next Avengers movie will be compared to Justice League however.

Okay, Batman/Superman and "Captain America: Civil War", then - in both cases you've got the idealized American hero up against a genius billionaire philanthropist in a tech-heavy suit.

 

[evilbob]

The OP has a fair point.

Marvel is already fatiguing audiences on its own brand, so of course the DC Johnny-come-lately movies are going to do poorly by contrast and people are going to be tired of them before they even come out. I think that's why DC is trying to do movies that are much more serious / darker - to differentiate them from the no-one-outside-of-comics-knows-the-difference Marvel movies that people are already getting tired of.

Similarly the Hobbit movies were TERRIBLE - but they were also coming on the not-to-distant heels of LotR, which was already a bit overwrought and overdone by the time it was finished, so to do the exact same thing again but worse just really torpedoed the genre. Movies typically take forever to make, so the WoW movie was probably in talks and getting started about the time the first Hobbit movie came out (and before people saw that they would ruin the series). So yeah, it's definitely going to be seen as a derivative humans vs. orcs story - which, as someone already pointed out, is 100% fair since WoW blatantly ripped off Tolkien to begin with - that audiences may be pretty tired of before it even gets shown thanks to the Hobbit debacle. Given that there's also no chance it will be a good movie, this sets the stage for an even weaker stomach for any D&D offering. And this is still all before we all realize that it will also be a horrible movie (Wrath of the Titans? BLEH - currently 25% at Rotten Tomatoes, btw).

Both of these movies will ultimately go down as what they are: cash-grabs trying to piggy-back off the success of LotR before the "fantasy" genre goes down in flames again, mostly thanks to these exact movies.

 

[Ryujin]

While I might rather like a Planescape based movie, I can't see such a movie being made.

Actually, a semi-episodic show based on Sigil (The City of Doors) could be awesome.

As could a serialization of GDQ (the Giants, Drow, Demonweb modules). Or a horror based series that involved Illithid. Brain eating tentacle monsters which can be created by implantating a parasite in your friend's brain seems ideal for horror.

Something combining Drow, Drittzt, and Faerun seems most likely. Although, I have a hard time seeing how that would work in comparison to what is being done nowadays, because the tropes seem too adolescent, and the characters too thinly defined.

Thx!

TomB

I missed your Sigil comment. It certainly worked for "Stargate: SG1."