Paula Patton, ex-wife of singer Robin Thicke, is set to star in Warcraft, a film based on a franchise of video games, novels, and other media by Blizzard Entertainment.
Patton will play Garona, a half-orc who is caught between her loyalties to the Alliance and the Horde.
The Warcraft series is made up of five core games: Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, World of Warcraft, and Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.
The games in the series are set around the fantasy setting of Azeroth, where human nations battle against the Orcish Horde with arrived in Azeroth via a dark portal.
The film has been talked about since 2006 when Blizzard Entertainment and Legendary Pictures announced that they were going to develop it. In 2009 it was announced that Sam Raimi (Evil Dead) would be directing but he later backed out due to his commitment to Oz the great and Powerful. Duncan Jones (Source Code) took over as director in 2013.
Jones said that Raimi had originally painted the Orcs in a bad light, so he changed it to make both sides sympathetic.
“In war movies, it’s rare to feel for both sides, and it’s even rarer to see that in fantasy movies,” he said, “so making it work for Warcraft was a challenge.”
Jones also describes the film as “Avatar and Lord of the Rings at the same time.”
Chirs Metzen, the creator of Warcraft, said that the film will be action-packed and violent. “We’re definitely not going to make a G or a PG version of this. It’s not PillowfightCraft.”
Along with Patton, other stars in the movie include Dominic Cooper (Captain America), Ben Foster (The Laramie Project), and Clancy Brown (The Shawshank Redemption).
Warcraft is scheduled for release on March 11, 2016.