All has been quiet on the Warcraft front ever since Universal opted to postpone the big-screen adaptation by 3 months, dropping the ambitious film smack bang in the middle of next year’s blockbuster season. Fast forward to today and Wired has unveiled a new still from Duncan Jones’ project, featuring Pacific Rim‘s Robert Kazinsky as a hulking orc known as Orgrim Doomhammer.
Described as the leading star of Universal’s Warcraft movie, Orgrim is said to mix gruff humor with a steely toughness, a trait that is overly apparent with a surname like Doomhammer, and Jones has said in the past that Kazinsky simply disappears into the role, despite the reliance on CG animation.
Fans of the Warcraft game series will no doubt recognize the design of Orgrims’ character, with the technical wizards at Industrial Light and Magic honing inspiration from the franchise’s illustrious vault of concept art and character design. Made up of much of the same team that worked on Avengers: Age of Ultron, the visual experts are on the verge of creating some of the most life-like CG characters ever to grace the silver screen. Speaking to Wired, here’s what Duncan Jones had to say on the matter of breaking past the uncanny valley.
“We’ve gone beyond the point where these are just creatures in movies,” Jones says. “We now have the technology and the ability to make new characters entirely.”
Following the aforementioned delay, Universal’s Warcraft movie is now on course for a release come June 10, 2016. And if this first image is any indication, fans of the original IP needn’t worry about the final product remaining loyal to the source material.
