… releases today on Netflix and it pains me that Activision Blizzard are are unwilling to invest in a similar production using their own IP’s to showcase the amazing talents of their artistic teams as demonstrated so often in their cinematics.
Just wanted to put that out there.
today? omg aaaaaa. did you know that when it first came out alot of people went to try out the game and suffered lol
Haha! That I did not know, but I do understand from what I read that apparently LoL is quite toxic.
S2 cost $250m … fat chance Blizzard spending that much when they cut corners everywhere.
The series is going to be drip fed like gaming content. Both Netflix and Amazon are doing this lately. Amazon releases 3 episodes of Vox a week at least but Netflix will do 3 episodes today and then one a week. Oh and they will make sure the final episode is screened on the first Saturday of December to ensure another month of sub 
But Blizzard released an entire movie and I suspect either just broke even or took a bit of a loss on it. It also got very bad crit reviews.
Edit: Found this snippet from Screen Rant’s website which I find interesting:
" Summary. Despite negative reviews, Warcraft became the highest-grossing video game movie, making $439 million worldwide. **The film’s underperformance domestically and failure to launch a franchise left it as the highest-grossing video game movie without a sequel.**10 Feb 2024 "
Arcane was nice to watch.
I would argue, subjectively of course, that the WoW film should have been 100% animated following the standards set of their expansion cinematics.
I can’t argue as films and film making is not my expertise, but the article seems to suggest that Blizzard’s dream was to have a franchise, possibly through the expansions, much like Marvel franchise. It just never took off - perhaps they should reboot it as an animation series. Seems to have worked wonders for Riot Games.
.riot is first a music and animation studio and then a gaming studio.
I firmly believe that if todays blizzard made an animated TV series it would flop hard. Arcane worked because they had established characters with very little story so they were able to build on that and make something new, where blizzard already have stories (most mediocre) and would end up retconing almost everything to fit an agenda.
It takes months to create a short cinematic in cinematic quality of only a few minutes.
It would just take several years to create an entire film in CGI quality, just alone to the fact how much rendereing power and thus rendering time you need, on top of the team needing to write, model, program, etc.
Otherwise we probably would’ve already seen films in “Gaming Intro CGI” quality.
Well then that explains the fantastic music score.
I think it is because they don’t really have any IPs left to showcase.
But what - for me subjectively - is the biggest red flag is that in order to generate any hype you need an exceptional writing team. Arcane’s S1 was a brilliant piece of media, easily one of the best shows on Netflix. Not only did it feature amazing animation, the character designs, voice acting and story were also on point. No one remembers the DOTA2 show, everyone raves about Arcane.
And if I’m being honest, I doubt modern Blizzard would manage to write a script anywhere near the quality of Arcane’s. And if you do not want to invest in a writing team that is capable of writing nothing short of a banger and then let them cook instead of meddling with their work to make sure it “represents the values and beliefs of Activision Blizzard” you might as well just throw your money into the incinerator. And that’d probably be more entertaining to watch than the show.
To be fair, shooting real footage can also be extremely time consuming, it’s just that the actual take isn’t that long.
But now that you mention “only a few minutes”, a “Love, Death and Robots” like show set in the Warcraft universe would rock. Short films that aren’t necessairly connected to each other, each with their creator’s unique style of art.
Read Jason Schreier’s book about Blizzard, he pretty much spills the beans on it all.
In broad strokes, there were plans to do TV series for Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch with Netflix.
But then the CFO of Activision Blizzard, Spencer Neumann, was poached by Netflix.
And then Activision Blizzard sued Netflix over that.
And you can’t make a TV series with a company you’re suing in court.
So that was the end of that journey.
Good book. Very spicy. I highly recommend it. 
Netflix is just the distributor though, don’t think they had a lot to do with the production apart from signing checks.
and Blizzard has ties with Amazon anyways.
As with most big companies, it’s run by demented old men that refuse to engage in popular media, someone would surely be willing to sponsor Blizzard 
media.
Technically, there are many more fish in the sea nowadays, and many of them struggling because they lack decent shows/movies. If Blizzard were to approach them with a decent proposition I’m sure they could work something out. But as I’ve said - Blizzard is neither capable of writing anything that would sell or have an IP that still attracts enough casual people to spend their money on.
And the book recommendation is interesting. I generally tend to avoid anything by Schreier, as he rarely remembers that he is supposed to be a journalist. If this is one of the rare occasions that he actually did his job it’d certainly be worth checking out. Thank you for recommending it.
What about Me’dan, I don’t think there’s much we know about him, and he seems like a really interesting character to me, I’d def watch it if they made a animated series around him.
WoW’s had it’s time. Even with the mess of the WoW movie, it was far too late in the game’s lifespan for some sort of tv series/film. The film’s lack of success sealed it’s fate. (apparently, and totally believable, this was down to Blizzard’s interference.)
Overwatch on the other hand could have had an animated TV series, a similar style to the trailers they used to make. I think they’ve missed the boat in that one too.
Streaming services thought they were being smart when they put a whole season up but soon realised why TV shows are stretched over time.
From what I understand from those that had read the relevant things ‘Me’dan’ was one of those characters they pretend never existed for good reason.
Me’dan is pretty disliked as a character, hes basically the Rey Skywalker of the wow universe and is OP for the sake of being OP.
Believe he’s been called a Mary Sue since his start.
S1 was good and will definitely watch S2 aswell. I was sad to hear the lol mmo was shot down or delayed indefinitely 
