As horrible as Uwe Boll's movies turn out, the whole background on his production is that it operates on a budget of peanuts. This is why studios love him. He sticks with video game movies because they already have a fan base. They turn a profit because of the low budget. When he approached blizzard on it, they were basically saying "if we're doing it, we're going to have a big budget which you have little experience with." I'd like to see what Uwe Boll would do with a big budget movie, heh, thankfully that'll never happen though. =)

I think they went away from Peter Jackson because they didn't want people to think it was another Lord of the Rings. Sam Raimi has enough connection with both the "experienced" crowd (Evil Dead) as well as the younger crowd (Spiderman).

The one big hope out of this is to really start putting video game movies into the limelight by backing a big budget movie and hopefully getting the sales to really turn some heads. Basically, Warcraft and Sam Raimi get one shot to really make or break the future of movies as a whole with this picture. If everything goes well, we'll have "big budget" video game movies coming out for the next 10 years. If it doesn't do well, then the video game movie market will be pretty much destroyed forever in regards to getting a large budget. It really will hinge on this movie.

Maybe it's just my wishful thinking, but I would love to see the big summer blockbusters be names like Zelda, Metroid and Half Life rather than diving deeper and deeper into the more obscure comic books.