The Warcraft movie is breaking box-office records...in China

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Well the previews made me cringe at how bad it was gonna be.
If;I were at a place with beer where I could openly heckle the screen with friends I MIGHT consider paying full price for it.

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The one place that serve beer has super strict rules. I don’t talk during movies per se, but I might whisper a comment or two. I got chastised for it. I guess they are pretty strict.

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It looked pretty awful from the trailer, but I never played the games much so I have no attachment to the idea in the first place. Dabbled with Warcraft 2 back in the day, I guess.

I hope Jones can get back to making stuff like Moon (although I wasn’t too excited by Source Code), so I’m not sure.

I liked this io9 article about it, though:

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Wait–It’s a little early to say it’s “tanking” here, isn’t it, based only on expectations, since it doesn’t have a full US opening (as far as I know) until tomorrow? Granted, the preliminary critic reviews seem pretty bad–but no worse than, say, Transformers II received, and it killed at the box office.

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it open’s here in the U.S. officially TONIGHT, so it’s ridiculous to say it’s tanking here. i think it looks great, but i’ve been playing WoW for seven years and counting, so i’m clearly biased. but critical reviews of a movie like this are very rarely worth reading, anyway – i’m more interested in the general public’s reception of it, and it seems to be doing well in that regard.

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Yeah, I expect this will be one of those movies where the opinions of professional critics and those who are drawn to go see it diverge quite a bit. I think it will do very, very well myself.

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I can only hope that Warcraft fans aren’t as disappointed as I was with Green Lantern. And the Transformers Movies. And the new TMNT movies. And the 2nd New Star Trek. And Star Wars Prequels. And… oh gawd, make it stop… please!

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From what I’ve heard from what I consider reliable reviewers it’s stand alone with nods to old guard fans. From what I understand it’s set before the first Warcraft game.

How is it tanking in the US when it doesn’t have an official release until Friday?

I mean, the trailer looks pretty bad, worse than the new Ghostbusters, but I doubt it is going to lose money, even domestically.

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It’s “tanking” by trying to hold enough aggro to keep critics focused on it, instead of movies like Assassin’s Creed that just aren’t meant to hold up to that kind of damage.

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the marketing department really dropped the ball on it – even duncan jones was facepalming over it, but he had to keep telling fans on twitter that it was out of his hands, and to just go see it for themselves and be the judge.

Played a little over the years but hardly a fan.

Loved the film.

But I doubt it has real mainstream appeal. Unlike something like LOTR which stripped the nuances out of Tolkien’s work. If anything the film has done the opposite.

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I have already seen the film and it’s really nice.

I played the game back in the days of yore, never got to the World of Warcraft thing, enjoyed the movie nevertheless.

I really don’t know where all the hate is coming from and why. Sure it has some issues with stuffing too much in a short runtime, but that’s hardly a reason to hate it that much.

DISCLAIMER: I’m currently in film school and I have passed the “insufferable film snob” phase into the “forgives a lot of shit because actually knows how hard is to make a movie”.

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I kinda like the first one, mostly because it didn’t pretend to be anything but a dumb movie about robots from outer space having a slugfest on earth cause well why not. No complicated crazy reasons just oops earth is where we ended up. That said I still didn’t pay full price for it either.

Oh I see a lot of dreck, seriously. See my posts in general film chat. However I can’t say that this looks like it will not be worth the $15 at the first run theater.
I will forgive a lot in a movie if there is a solid coherent story to be told.

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Transformers pissed me off.

I loved the old Bob Budiansky and Simon Furman comics, which were much better than the crappy toy commercials they could have been.

Never cared much for the cartoon series (I do have some nostalgic fondness for Transformers: The Movie, even if it is a bit rubbish).

But Michael Bay is a hack and his films are just loud and dumb.

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Yes they are. But as I said the first one didn’t pretend to be anything more than that so at least for me it worked. I doubt I would watch it again without friends to make comments with but it was fun for a matinee show on a day off work.

There is so much shit that made no god damn sense… I just couldn’t.

“And then Megatron froze…”

Froze? Because it’s cold on earth right? Not at all like INTERPLANETARY SPACE???

The thing is, I personally, Mister.44, could have come up with a few seconds of changed exposition and a few minor changes that could have kept most of the film the same, but anyone over the age of 6 would no longer be wondering why the hell the story was so goddamn stupid. It is like Michael Bay is just TRYING to see how stupid a script can be and still sell tickets. (I had a whole write up on this, I might be able to find it. If someone cared.)

I couldn’t even enjoy just watching robots fight each other. 1) The character design bore ZERO resemblance to the Transformers - old or new - any generation. I think they just used an algorithm where you enter how many millions of polygons would be needed to make the skin, and then the computer shit it out. They looked like crap and 2) too much of the action was too tight and too fast. It looked like an iPhone whirling around in one of those industrial blenders. They needed to zoom the fuck out so we could appreciate the scale better.

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Haven’t played Warcraft since orcs vs humans so I got no particular grasp of the lore or any real love for the series, but I ended up really enjoying this movie. I think a big part of what works is the pacing, the moment you start to feel even a little bored since cool shit starts happening.
Also the orcs are metal as fuck.

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