With the psychotic popularity of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft, its surprising to me that some studio hasn’t really stepped up and made a movie about it. I remember at the SXSW film festival this year seeing a little documentary on it called “Second Skin“, but with the popularity of these sorts of games, you’d think the topic would be ripe for a narrative big screen adaptation. Well… it looks like its indeed coming.
Apparently Pirates Of The Caribbean director Gore Verbinski is developing just such a film. The folks over at ComingSoon give us this:
Universal and “Pirates of the Caribbean” director Gore Verbinski have acquired a 2007 Wall Street Journal article they will use as the basis for a film about the online fantasy role-playing world and its detrimental impact on the real lives of players. The article by Alexandra Alter focuses on a married man who spends as many as 20 hours a day on a computer, existing through an avatar who is a thriving, musclebound entrepreneur. In reality, he is a diabetic, chain-smoking 53-year-old.
So this would be a movie more about the people who PLAY these games… not stories that take place in the games themselves (like the long rumored World of Warcraft movie). Sounds interesting… but really… what would the movie be about?
