Warcraft Movie Trailer

If ever there was a studio that embodied the difference between winning and leading it’d be Universal.  They basically struck gold with the Fast & Furious movies and have been letting that box office money pit accumulate while floundering about in search of fellow hit makers and it’s served them well with equally successful hits like Pitch Perfect, Despicable Me, 50 Shades of Grey, and this year’s mega box office smash Jurassic World.  The thing is that “experimentation” really is the Universal approach as none of their efforts have been in order to define trends or lead the pop cultural scene, simply attempts to get money making films. 

That’s why, even though Jurassic World made unfathomable amounts of cash and Fast & Furious is on its 8^th film I’d never call Universal trend riders or taste makers.  So their latest venture, a collaboration with Blizzard Studios to bring the massively successful Warcraft franchise to life on the big screen is throwing me for a bit of a loop as it actually seems like the most financially successful yet culturally irrelevant studio in Hollywood has finally decided to step up to the plate and lead the way for a change. 

Alice Through The Looking Glass Trailer

One of the weird things about the late 2000s trend of up-jumping classic fairy tales, seminal works of literature we all know from childhood, and even bible stories and myths into fantasy blockbusters is that very few of these films have actually been successful.  Sure, we’ve cranked out film after film in this genre like Mirror Mirror, Jack the Giant Slayer, Pan, Hansel & Gretel: Witchhunters, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Dracula Untold, Hercules and countless more but for the most part they’ve all been total failures, regardless of actual quality.  That same disclaimer, regardless of quality, applies to the smattering of financial success within the genre, almost all of which seem to come from the pop culture warriors at Disney. 

To some extent it makes sense that Disney are the folks making the most money on easily accessible revisions to classic fairy tales, myths, and literature given that’s been their bread and butter since before World War 2.  At the same time however, Disney did more than anyone to launch this particular trend with the 2010 mega-hit Alice in Wonderland, which ended up the 2^nd highest grossing film of the year, beating out competitors like Harry Potter 7 and Twilight: Eclipse.  Now, Disney returns to the Alice well 6 years later with a sequel minus Tim Burton entitled Alice Through The Looking Glass.