Warcraft director Duncan Jones has confirmed via Twitter that he had mapped out the basic story for a Warcraft film trilogy before plans for subsequent Warcraft movies fell apart.
“Part 2 would have been Go’el/Thrall as a young orc slave in Blackmoore’s gladiator camp,” Jones says in regards to his intentions for a sequel to 2016’s Warcraft. “Here he meets & befriends a Tauren who tells him of another land to the west where his people come from, & where he might find allies & maybe a new home…”
From there, Jones goes on to describe what an eventual third Warcraft movie would have dealt with.
“The gathering horde army and freeing of orcs around the Eastern kingdom before a dangerous trip across the sea to Kalimdor, & the founding of the 1st Azerothian city of Orgrimmar,” Jones says. “Basically the trilogy was the fulfilling of Durotan’s promise to give his people a new home.”
Additionally, Jones noted that he hoped to set-up the foundations of the Warcraft universe with his trilogy of movies before ultimately handing the film franchise over to another director and creative team in the hopes of them telling some of the more infamous stories from Warcraft lore.
Before we dive into the details of Jones’ creative plans for future Warcraft movies, we should probably talk a bit about why those movies were never released. Simply put Warcraft was a financial and critical disappointment. While the movie actually made quite a bit of money in international markets, the world’s overall reception to the final product didn’t entirely justify Warcraft‘s high costs and arguably higher expectations. Jones had previously indicated that the chances for a sequel were low and the fact that he outlined his plans for an eventual trilogy of movies on Twitter doesn’t exactly inspire hopes that we’ll ever see his stories play out on the big screen.
We do find Jones’ ideas for a trilogy to be interesting, though. It’s clear that he wanted to focus on the adventure and lore of the Horde moving forward, and it also seems like he was more interested in telling fairly intimate stories about the characters in this universe rather than sweeping action epics. Actually, his philosophy in that respect kind of helps explain some of the things that went wrong with the Warcraft film.
As anyone who has followed Blizzard’s incredible work with the World of Warcraft story cinematics over the years will tell you, there is still potential for someone to come along and make an incredible movie based on this series. It just doesn’t sound like that movie will happen in the near future, and it certainly doesn’t sound like they will portray what Duncan Jones had planned for the series.