But the producers are still confident of the blockbuster goal of “Warcraft” as the movie expects to draw good support from China, considered as the world’s fastest-growing film economy and home to millions of certifiable “World of Warcraft” addicts.
“Warcraft” will also be released to movie theaters worldwide some 10 years after game developer Blizzard Entertainment made the announcement about the film.
“WoW” has a total of 5.5 million subscribers and a third of those are in China. Without the Chinese market, the producers would not even dare make a “Warcraft” movie. In fact, the film is funded by Chinese film enterprise, Legendary Entertainment, before it was acquired by the Chinese group Dalian Wanda this year.
Incidentally, China has a distinct relationship with “World of Warcraft,” a game that had a transformative effect when it entered the country’s online multiplayer game arena.
While the Chinese government had operated a heavily-controlled internet since the middle of the 1990s, by the early 200s, a widening technology gap forced it to deregulate certain aspects of its online culture.
Because of the regulation of the Chinese gaming, Chinese gamers went from the two-dimensional presentation of online worlds to the all-encompassing spectacle of “World of Warcraft,” which drew players together both in the physical spaces of internet cafes and in the online realm of Azeroth.