Sam Raimi signed on to direct a movie based on “World of Warcraft” in 2009, but departed the project by 2012, citing scheduling issues and game publisher Blizzard not wanting to wait any longer, but that’s not the whole story. 

Speaking with Vulture in 2013, Raimi said he didn’t like the script he was handed that was written by the folks at Blizzard. Instead, he chose to write an entirely original story with “Saving Private Ryan” screenwriter Robert Rodat. “We pitched it to Legendary and they accepted it, and then we pitched it to Blizzard, and they had reservations, but they accepted it,” Raimi said. “Then Robert wrote the screenplay, and only once he was done did we realize that Blizzard had veto power, and we didn’t know that. And they had never quite approved the original story we pitched them.”

According to Raimi, by the time Rodat started again, Blizzard was out of patience, and they decided to go in a different direction. Though it is unclear what script he was working with at the beginning, Jones also had reservations about the “Warcraft” script. “It was the stale fantasy trope of, humans are the good guys, monsters are the bad guys,” Jones told The New York Times when the film finally came out. “It just didn’t capture in my gut what made Warcraft, the idea of heroes being on both sides.” The final film was not based on “World of Warcraft,” but on its prequel game, simply titled “Warcraft,” and the film was a commercial disappointment.

What is interesting is how active Blizzard was in the development, at least at first. Nowadays, fans are much more vocal about films being faithful to the source material, and just look at how big of a hit “Arcane” was, and that TV show is made in-house by the game publisher. Though it is debatable whether the original plan with the script Blizzard had in mind would have been better, it’s still interesting how much the subsequent filmmakers who joined the project wanted to stray away from it, and how little the final film resembled “World of Warcraft.”