Future of Movie Trailers…

…is Game trailers. Or Machinima. Or a mashup of a film, a game, and a game engine. What came first – the passive version or the active version? All compelling questions as we see the migration of film into virtual and virtual into film. Yep, I guess cross media has always been about blurring that boundary further between fantasy (film) and fantasy (game).

…. a user generated movie clip using the World of Warcraft game engine The storyline is about an upcoming release (expansion) of World of Warcraft, called Wrath of the Lich King (Hero class). We’ve no idea when the new version is going to be released, maybe in a year? Already 2 million views on YouTube. If you are not au fait with World of Warcraft (au fait in this context means immersed in the subculture in order to understand the rituals and roles to effect a social media marketing campaign) you probably couldn’t create an ad that would be willingly viewed by 2 million on YouTube and goodness knows how many on other sites. World of Warcraft has around 10 million subscribers paying a monthly fee, has revenue of 1.1 billion per year, and 560 million of that is profit.

Here’s the official Blizzard trailer for the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King (Hero class) Release.

Only 1 million 400 thousand views, yet it is the official trailer.

Don’t think of virtual worlds or online games as something for losers and geeks, think of them as The Former Cinema Audience. Cos that’s where the audience went. Don’t believe me? Check out the number of real world movies being made about fantasy world games. Including a World of Warcraft movie coming to a cinema near you soon. PS someone gave me the list of all the games that have movies in production, but I can’t find it now. Do you have one? Movies as the loss leader for Games. heh.