Duncan Jones's big-screen take on the insanely addictive MMORPG "Warcraft" won't be out until 2016, and details so far have been fairly scarce. Maybe that's because the release date is over a year away! In any case, the "Moon" director has shared some information about the movie's plot with the Chinese news site Mtime, and it sounds pretty cool so far. Thanks much to diehard fansite ManMadeMovies for making the translation available!

Jones said, "As you may know, there has been a long history of trying to make a 'Warcraft' film, and for a number of reasons, it never quite happened. I was lucky. When I went to talk to Chris Metzen and the guys at Blizzard, we both saw things the same way. A 'Warcraft' film should not be about a good race of humans battling an evil race of orcs! 'Warcraft' should be about heroes on both sides trying to avoid a conflict, when villains leave them no choice."

He went on to add, "From the moment I first talked to Blizzard, the plan was to start our film with the first time orcs met humans. First contact! I think that for a world with so much newness to explain, this was a wise choice, especially when so many people in our audience may not know anything about 'Warcraft'... it was important that some of our characters would be seeing the world fresh as well, and that the audience could see the situation through their eyes."

Video game movies are notoriously hard to get right, but it probably helps a lot that Jones is himself a gamer. He told Badass Digest in 2010, "I'm a real gamer and I think there are less real gamers involved in directing only because you have to spend so much time making films that there's no time to be a hardcore gamer. I'm just slightly insane and I stay up all night playing games. In the day I'm working and at night I play games."

Jones also added that he was "hugely jealous of Sam Raimi," who was attached to a WoW project at the time. "I really believe 'World of Warcraft' could be the launch of computer games as good films. And from the little I've read of interviews with him the way he's approaching it makes so much sense. It's what I was talking about - it's not worrying about how the game plays, it's about creating the world of the game and investing the audience in that world."

We'll get to find out if "Warcraft" translates to the big screen when it opens on March 11, 2016. In the meantime, we've got some orcs to fight.

[Via Empire]