Seven years separate the two most prominent films about World of Warcraft. The first was a $160 million blockbuster directed by Duncan Jones, starring Travis Fimmel and Ben Foster, built to launch a franchise. The second was a Norwegian documentary that cost a fraction of that and premiered on Netflix with almost no marketing. One of them got WoW right.
What Warcraft (2016) got wrong
To be fair to Duncan Jones, he was solving a real problem. World of Warcraft has twenty-plus years of accumulated lore: wars between orcs and humans, the corruption of Medivh, the sundering of entire worlds. If you’re making a film for an audience that has never logged in, the fantasy world is the obvious place to start. It’s visual. It has armies. It gives you something to put on a poster.
The trouble is that the lore is not why people play WoW. It never was.
The 2016 film follows Anduin Lothar (Fimmel) and the mage Medivh (Foster) through the first Human-Orc war drawn from the original Warcraft strategy game, 1994 source material that predates World of Warcraft by a decade. There’s nothing wrong with that as a creative choice. But it means the film is, functionally, a fantasy movie with WoW branding rather than a film about why millions of people decided to spend years of their lives inside this particular game. The orcish worldbuilding is decent. The action sequences work. China loved it. American critics mostly didn’t. And even the people who found it enjoyable would probably admit it left them no clearer on what WoW actually is.
The question the film never asks is: why does WoW hold people? Not what the game’s story is, but what the game does to its players over time. A major Hollywood production answered none of that, because it was looking at the game’s fiction and not at the millions of people who made the game what it became.
What Ibelin got right
Mats Steen was a Norwegian man who died in 2014 at 25, from Duchenne muscular dystrophy. His disease had confined him to a wheelchair from childhood. He had spent much of his social life inside World of Warcraft, playing a character named Ibelin.
When his parents wrote a blog post after his death, they expected the quiet grief of a small circle. Instead, thousands of people responded from across Europe, from the United States, from countries his parents had never heard him mention. These were people who had known Mats for years, who had raided with him, grieved with him, celebrated with him. People he had never met outside the game.
Director Benjamin Ree’s 2023 documentary builds from that discovery outward. It interviews the players who knew Ibelin. It reconstructs scenes from inside Azeroth using game footage and animation. And it asks, seriously, what these relationships were. Were they real? The film’s answer is yes, and it makes the case carefully, through the people themselves, without sentimentality and without the opposite mistake of treating online friendship as inherently lesser.
What Ibelin understood is the thing Warcraft (2016) completely missed: WoW is a place where people build identities over years. Your race, your class, your guild history, your reputation on a server all accumulate. Someone who has played since 2004 has a character that carries the weight of everything they’ve done in the game. Choosing to play a vulpera over a human or a night elf is not a trivial aesthetic call. It’s the first act of deciding who you are in that world, and that decision compounds. Mats Steen chose to be Ibelin, and Ibelin became someone people genuinely loved.
The film also captures the obsessive, iterative quality of being invested in WoW. Players track every shift in the game’s systems, pore over patch notes, check the midnight dps tier list after every tuning pass to figure out what spec to run for the next raid tier. That kind of obsessive attention is not detachment from real life. For Mats, and for a lot of players, it was engagement with something that mattered to them deeply, structured around a community that showed up consistently.
Why the gap between them matters
There’s a persistent failure mode in films about games: the production treats the game’s fictional surface as the subject and the players as incidental. Warcraft did this. The Ready Player One adaptation did it too. The film ends up asking whether the game’s world is cool enough to justify its runtime, which was never the right question.
Ibelin inverted the formula. The game world appears constantly, but as context for human behavior, not as spectacle. You’re never being asked to care whether the Horde wins. You’re being asked to care whether the people inside the game mattered to each other. And they did.
The narrative feature currently in production, with Charlie Plummer, Anthony Hopkins, Toni Collette, Isabela Merced, and Maisy Stella, will be worth watching for exactly this reason. The cast signals real ambition. The risk is that turning documentary material into a conventional narrative reintroduces the problem, that the drama gets located in plot mechanics rather than in the texture of what Mats’s life inside the game actually was.
The documentary doesn’t need to solve that. It just follows the evidence: here are the people, here is what they said, here is what they lost. Warcraft gave you a war. Ibelin gave you a community, and the community turned out to be the more honest subject.