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. 

1st Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Set Photos Debut

Edited by Robert Beach 

The importance of the Harry Potter franchise to the modern age of fantasy, blockbuster, and cinematic landscape cannot be overstated. This franchise is a pop culture phenomena second to none; a tremendously popular book series that was translated in something close to its entirety to the big screen in a radical cinematic experiment of letting the actors age through the films over the course of an entire decade.  

Modern pop culture, geek and nerd pop culture specifically, just doesn’t make sense without Harry Potter. Especially for Warner Brothers, the company that spent nearly 10 years dominating the entire fantasy genre thanks to the double barrel blast that was the Potter films and the Lord of the Rings movies. And now, with the fantasy power vacuum still unaddressed since the recession of Game of Thrones’ influence over the medium, and the Hobbit films having run their disappointing course, WB is returning to the Harry Potter well one more time for a prequel series all their own entitled Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and we’ve just received the first set photos.