While the highly anticipated live-action adaptation of Warcraft failed to live up to expectations and ultimately cost the studio upwards of $15 million, the 2016 movie is finding new love on Netflix this week.
As you may already know, the Warcraft franchise is one of the highest-grossing video game series of all time, with more than $11 billion in sales and revenue as of 2018. Not only has the main series received critical acclaim as standalone outings, but World of Warcraft still retains its spot as one of the most popular massively multiplayer online games around the globe.
And so, given this outstanding prevalence, it’d only make sense for a cinematic adaptation to imitate the success of its other medium counterparts. That wasn’t the case with Duncan Jones’s Warcraft: The Beginning, unfortunately, which bombed at the box office and premiered to middling reviews in 2016.
But now, nearly five years after its release, fans of the fantasy flick have returned to pay tribute to the world of Azeroth on live-action by streaming it on Netflix. According to FlixPatrol’s current rankings, Warcraft is the 10th most popular film on the platform today, July 2nd. Not too shabby for a movie that didn’t break even through its theatrical run, right?
Credit where credit’s due, of course, the film didn’t do so terribly when compared to other video game adaptations of the last decade, even managing to dethrone Disney’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time as the highest-grossing video game film adaptation of all time.
That being said, a prolonged development process and lack of a singular vision are just a few things that turn Warcraft into an incoherent mess, both in a technical sense and narrative-wise. Though after several years, I guess fans and Netflix users, in particular, have managed to find qualities that warrant a rewatch after all.