Warcraft has landed on Netflix’s Top 10 chart in the United States. Based on Blizzard’s video game series of the same name, the 2016 action fantasy film follows heroes on opposing sides of a war, as a horde of Orcs invades the planet Azeroth using a magic portal. The video game adaptation was directed by Duncan Jones, who co-wrote the script with Charles Leavitt, and a Warcraft cast that includes Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper, Toby Kebbell, Ben Schnetzer, Robert Kazinsky, and Daniel Wu.

Now, eight years after its release, the video game adaptation is a hit on Netflix. For the week of July 1-7, Warcraft ranked fourth on Netflix’s list of Top 10 films in the United States. New Netflix originals Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F and A Family Affair took the top two spots, followed by Paw Patrol: The Movie in third. Rounding out the top five is Minions in fifth place.

Warcraft Represents A Darker Time For Video Game Adaptations

The Golden Age Had Yet To Begin

Released in 2016, Warcraft was one of the last failed video game adaptations before the golden age began. The movie was widely disliked by critics, with Warcraft reviews considering it a slow-moving and unoriginal adaptation of its best-selling source material that offers little cinematic value. Additionally, the movie contains an abundance of characters, convoluted mythology, and clichéd dialogue. However, reviews did praise Warcraft for offering plenty of visual excitement courtesy of the talented Duncan Jones, who has also directed Moon, Source Code, and Mute.

In addition to receiving generally negative reviews from critics, Warcraft was also a box-office disappointment, despite seemingly being a success on the surface. The movie made only $47 million in the United States, but largely due to its substantial success in China, where it made over $225 million alone, Warcraft ended up grossing a total of $439 worldwide. Despite this, it failed to break even at the box office, where it would have required $450-500 million when accounting for its $160 million budget and additional marketing and distribution costs.

Warcraft was one of the last failures before the golden age of video game adaptations began in the late 2010s. After its release, several video game adaptations started to become successful at the box office, including 2019’s Detective Pikachu, the Sonic the Hedgehog series (2020–2024), 2022’s Uncharted, and 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie. This success also extends to television with HBO’s The Last of Us and Prime Video’s Fallout. With this substantial uptick in critical and commercial success, the golden age of video adaptations has begun, and hopefully, it’s here to stay.

Warcraft is streaming on Netflix and for free on Tubi.

Source: Netflix