[Image: Sina]
Not to be confused with the Hollywood Warcraft film, this is My WoW. As website The Nanfang points out, its Chinese title is 我的魔兽世界, which literally means “My World of Warcraft”. Oh. OK.
Pretty sure that should be “Blizzard’s World of Warcraft,” but it doesn’t seem like Blizzard is involved, so…
As Sina previously reported, the movie was revealed last month at a press conference in Shijiazhuang; however, details about the film’s plot, other than it will involve fantasy, time travel and love, weren’t disclosed in detail. According to The Nanfang, the movie’s Chinese tagline translates to: “A man gets transported to a fantasy world of warcraft, where the impossible occurs…”
The movie does feature Hong Kong actor Jatfei Wong as well as other people in familiar costumes.
Very familiar.
The film’s director Zhang Wei is quoted as saying, “I have injected the entirety of my fervor and passion into this movie, completely depleting the whole of my efforts to show a spectacle that is both sensible to a logical mind and yet remains an unceasing marvel for the eyes to behold.”
Online in China, people were highly critical of the film for obvious reasons. My WoW is supposed to open this month, which is right before the actual Warcraft film hits theatres. Of course it is!
Kotaku reached out to Blizzard for comment to see if the studio is involved with this project but did not hear back prior to publication.
Comments
11 responses to “China Has Its Own World of Warcraft Movie”
“if blizzard is involved” hahah good one
Ah China, always seemingly content to clone ideas by other people and create knockoffs which are the laughing stock of the world.
Is this a cultural thing we don’t understand? Or is it simply a nauseating cavalcade of laziness and greed?
I have a feeling it’s because they feel they are isolated from the rest of the world in terms of what they feel they’re not allowed to do (in which case they don’t care because communism?) so they just take as much liberties as they can creatively and not have to worry about the fallout. that and considering they’re a juggernaut when it comes to the world economy, so all these other countries are probably too afraid to pursue it.
The idea is to make money with little to no effort, and in the shortest amount of time.
Something like Angry Birds, from scratch, took thought, ingenuity, planning, coding, and possibly some marketing.
You’ll guarentee money by making a clone. You need no thought, no ingenuity, no planning, probably just steal the coding, and the marketting is done by Angry Birds themselves. Just name it Angry Feathers or Irked Birds, and that shit will appear on the Android/IOS store next to Angry Birds.
Another method is say, Renault hires a factory in China to manufacture a chassis or even just a hubcap. The plant operator will be given fabrication blueprints, which just so happens to get photocopied and given to other manufacturers, usually owned by a relative. No one needs to get paid for creativity, design, or whatever. Half the job is already done. Why waste funds.
One thing to note is that China doesn’t just assimilate things from around the world, they also steal from their own, a lot.
The reason China does this a lot is not beacuse China is greedy and lazy (people are like that everywhere). But beacuse its not illegal in China. Unlike most of the world.
It’s very much a cultural thing. Through most of China’s history, skill has been passed down through repetition and copying. Calligraphy is taught by reproducing masterwork examples repeatedly until the form is perfected or improved. Crafts like pottery and woodwork are learned by trying to copy the master’s methods and styles. In historical Chinese culture copying isn’t seen as bad, it’s actually considered respectful as it acknowledges that the original work is a paragon in its class. The Chinese method of learning has typically been to copy the skill of the master, then improve it, a process that was evidently successful as Chinese artisans and craftsmen long held reputations for excellence even outside of China. And still today, Chinese culture is about who does it best, not who does it first.
There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with this approach, it’s just different. It’s not theft because it’s an outside concept that an idea can be owned in the first place. A lot of people tend to be critical of the Chinese approach to things but only because they’re normalised to western notions of ownership. It’s certainly true that there are people who copy to make a quick buck as well, but that happens in western countries too, even without the significant difference in cultural history.
In western culture it just doesn’t happen with same blatant and tacky disregard for intellectual property. Because someone would litigate.
The way china does things may be a result of cultural divides but it doesn’t push creativity forward or offer any sort of progression. It’s always cheap tacky and smacks of greed. China may be a superpower but it’s also a country that treats it’s citizens like garbage, disregards all kinds of international safety and human rights standards, and exists in a vacuum where it’s seemingly ok to use everyone else’s IP and commercial and industrial ideas like their own personal picnic basket. It’s little wonder their citizens emigrate in the millions to countries that don’t operate like an ever flushing toilet.
Seems you have a few misconceptions about modern China. It might be worth doing some actual research into the country; China isn’t perfect by any means but you might be surprised to find it has fewer problems than you think.
Specifically with respect to intellectual property, you’d have to be crazy to believe that the western systems that produced the DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, etc. are in any way reasonable. The fact we have articles in newspapers and sites like this arguing in favour of piracy and circumventing region restrictions is evidence that our own culture’s views on intellectual property are misguided and draconian. China’s historical approach to this is in line with the way IP was handled by most of the world until relatively recently.
On innovation, the actual evidence speaks for itself. On both the Bloomberg and World Economic Forum rankings for innovation, China ranks well. On patent innovation, Bloomberg ranks China third, ahead of the United States and only marginally behind Japan and South Korea. On technology innovation, China ranks second, just barely behind the United States. There’s no evidence to support the assertion that strong intellectual property protection boosts innovation, and several of the top-ranked innovative countries have somewhat lax IP laws compared to the US.
On emigration, it’s best to look at the statistics, not the hyperbolic headlines. China’s net emigration rate in the last few years was around 0.04%, roughly on par with Poland, Macedonia and Malaysia, none of which would be described as unusual. In fact, it’s surprisingly low considering China relaxed its emigration restrictions in the last decade.
On human rights, China certainly still has some way to go, but it’s made significant progress since the Tiananmen Square massacre and resolution in 1989 and even further since the current government took over in 2013. A lot of misconceptions of China’s human rights conditions relate to things that don’t exist any more. For instance, China has had fewer political prisons per capita than the United States for the last decade or two, based on both US government and Amnesty International reports in 2013-14.
China is a fascinating country, and one of the fastest changing counties in the world over the last few decades – a remarkable feat considering its huge geographical and population size. Given its importance to Australia in terms of both economy and political influence, it’s definitely worth taking the time to research what’s been happening there since the 1980s. Just take care to find the whole picture, don’t just cherry-pick only the good or only the bad.
Some of the Chinese and HK movies are damn good, (I love Storm Riders), but dare I say, the WoW porn parodies will probably be better quality than this.
I like how “My Wow” is written in that “cheap chinese restaurant/massage” font. Very fitting.
Not sure if its due to the translation, but when you get transported to a (the?) fantasy world of warcraft, nothing’s impossible anymore
Yeah seems like “very/highly improbable”would have been a better fit lol