Blizzard's Warcraft game franchise is among the biggest in all of gaming, but that didn't save the Duncan Jones-directed Warcraft film from a disappointing box office run in the United States. The movie only brought in $47 million domestically, far less than half of the film's production budget.
That being said, the movie made up for a weak domestic showing with a huge international haul thanks largely to Chinese audiences, earning more than $433 million when it was all said and done.
That begs the question: will a Warcraft 2 happen? Despite U.S. critics seeming to despise the film, its success in China definitely leaves the door open for a sequel. Jones, for his part, says he's open to working on another entry.
"If there were an opportunity for us to make another film in the Warcraft universe I really feel like we did the hard work in the first movie as far as setting the table," Jones recently said in an interview with Thrillist (via Collider). "I would love to capitalize on 3 and a half years of hard work and be able to have some fun in that world now that I've done the hard work. [So] who knows? Maybe I'm just being a masochist."
He goes on to explain that he's both proud and frustrated by Warcraft as a final product, saying that numerous "little changes" made to the film added up.
"Trying to make a movie like Warcraft, and trying to do it in a unique way ... you get killed by a death of 1,000 cuts," Jones said. "Not just editing cuts. It's little changes that seem really innocuous. As a filmmaker the only way that I understand how to make a film is holistically. Every choice that I make, whether it is story or character or costume, all works together. When you make a little change it doesn't seem like a big deal. When you keep making those little changes, especially over three and a half years, suddenly you're basically spending all of your time trying to work out how to patch up what has been messed around with."
It sounds like the studios responsible for funding the film caused Warcraft to be a different product than the movie Jones envisioned in his head. That kind of sentiment is hardly a new phenomenon, and is in fact something that's becoming more common as filmmakers with no previous track record crafting massive summer blockbusters find themselves working on massive tentpole projects. Director Josh Trank said much the same following the massive commercial and critical failure of his Fantastic Four reboot.
Unlike Fantastic Four, however, Warcraft did manage to please fans of the game series, and there's no denying the impressive special effects work present in the film. Jones did the hard work of planting the seeds of the Warcraft film franchise, but it will be up to Blizzard, Legendary and others to water it and make it grow, with or without Jones.
