Raimi: Blizzard soured WoW movie deal

The World of Warcraft film adaptation by Spider-Man and Evil Dead director Sam Raimi fell apart because Blizzard "mismanaged" the pre-production, according to the A-list director.

Commenting on his woes during the script-writing phase of the project, Raimi candidly explained that poor communication from the company and a disagreement over the direction of the story held up the production.

After discarding the in-house film script produced by Blizzard, the director explained that he and screenwriting pal Robert Rodat penned their own story, which movie producer Legendary signed on to.

However, Blizzard wasn't so happy about the changes but kept its reservations a secret for nine months until it vetoed the story at the last minute.

"Only once he [Rodat] was done did we realise that Blizzard had veto power, and we didn't know that," he explained to Vulture.

"They had never quite approved the original story we pitched them... so after we had spent nine months working on this thing, we basically had to start over," he continued, saying that Blizzard eventually lost its patience and pulled the plug on the collaboration.

Raimi added: "Honestly, I think it was mismanagement on their behalf, not to explain to us that the first story was vetoed long ago. Why did they let us keep working on it? Were they afraid to tell me?"

However, Raimi was upbeat about the current World of Warcraft film in pre-production by Moon director Duncan Jones, saying that he is a "strikingly talented director".

image: © SobControllers

James Lee

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James Lee is a freelance writer and analyst with extensive experience in the technology, media and games sectors. For the past few years he has provided content for internationally published industry reports, SEO companies and a variety of news-focused websites. Prior to this, James was responsible for covering news and producing in-depth features for GamesIndustry.biz while occasionally contributing to its sister-site. Eurogamer.net. In addition to this he has contributed to other notable sites such as CVG.co.uk, Edge-Online and DigitalSpy.