But it made that $220.8m at lightning speed, and there is no guarantee that a Chinese-tilted Warcraft 2 would A) make more than $220.8m in China or B) make significantly more in China so as to compensate for the various international markets in which it wouldn’t play.

Yes, Warcraft made $220.8 million in China while only making $213m over the rest of the world combined. If Premium Rush were one of only 34 movies playing in North America in 2012, I’d imagine Premium Rush would have done better in domestic theaters.Īll of these advantages and the film still dropped like a stone once paying audiences got a look at it. It will be one of around 34 American films admitted this year for Chinese exhibition.

Tencent, the owner of WeChat, was a key marketing player.

Legendary was recently acquired by China’s Dalian Wanda Group and Wanda (China’s largest movie theater operator) helped put the film on tons of screens. Warcraft was big in China because around half the world’s players come from China. Yes, I am invoking the Tomb Raider Trap, and you should be too. We cannot presume that a second Warcraft movie, even a better one, won’t suffer the fate of any number of “superior sequels to inferior originals” that vastly underperformed the second time out because audiences didn’t like what they saw. budgets the next Warcraft film in a way that it can be profitable by making the vast bulk of its money in the first 48 hours in China, then go for it. If Blizzard, Atlas and/or Universal/Comcast Corp. But a theoretical Warcraft sequel that skews heavily to China and doesn’t play in other parts of the world is not a success but rather an admission of failure.

Second warcraft movie