Crafty conflict between film and game

Warcraft will be screened in China on June 8, which the director says will draw both gamers and moviegoers. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Game fans will also be delighted to find that the language spoken by the orcs has a complete grammar system.

An American linguist, who creates languages for fantasy films and such TV series as Game of Thrones, was recruited to work on Warcraft.

"He took a couple of well-known phrases from the Warcraft games and he built an entire language," Jones says, adding that anyone on set had to learn how to speak those words.

The celebrity cast also encountered unprecedented challenges during filming.

Wu, a heartthrob of many Chinese women, hid his good looks behind an ugly, slouching appearance－the villain Gul'dan.

He has never acted like that before－wearing tights and clothes attached to motion-capture chips. Wu says he rehearsed nearly a month to get the character's movements right.

"If you were an orc, you could be as tall as 3 meters and weigh around 300 kilograms. So you would walk and move in ways that are different from humans," Wu says.

The presale box office has raked in up to 100 million yuan ($15.15 million), almost double that of Fast and Furious 7, Hollywood's highest-grossing film in China of all time.

Despite poor reviews on foreign websites, most Chinese fans say they'll go to the cinemas to watch Warcraft.

"I just want to see the sets and characters I've been obsessed with for years. It's exciting," says 32-year-old Xue Lei, a computer engineer in Beijing.

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