Good grief… While Moon man Duncan Jones has been laying hints about a big new project in the works on the Twitter-wires, we’re not sure we expected this. Jones has signed on to tackle the Warcraft movie for Legendary Entertainment.
Yes, the film based on Blizzard Entertainment’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game World Of Warcraft. The one that Sam Raimi had been developing to direct before he decided to head off to a different magical land for Oz The Great And Powerful instead.
The Warcraft universe – which has spread across several releases and expansions to become the biggest online gaming experience – certainly provides a lot of fodder for a movie, including mages, dragons, and orcs rubbing shoulders with aliens and zombies and, er, pandas.
For now, we don’t know exactly what Jones will be bringing to the screen. Charles Leavitt wrote the script and Dark Knight trilogy producer Charles Roven is overseeing the film, aiming to kick off shooting later this year for a likely 2015 release. That year just gets more and more crowded, doesn’t it?
This new pic is a big leap of ambition for the man who launched himself upon the filmmaking world with Moon and followed it up with Source Code. It’s a budgetary jump as well, with estimates on Warcraft around the $100 million plus mark. But Jones has proved he’s got what it takes to make good movies, so while we’d also like to see him shoot the Ian Fleming biopic, this could open the doors to get that and all his other dream projects made. And more to the point, he seems like a great choice to adapt Warcraft for the screen.