Vendôme Pictures and Pathé are venturing into the World of Warcraft, though not in the way one might expect. Following their collaboration on the Best Picture-winning CODA, the two banners are now working on Ibelin, a new film that’s based on the true story of a young man with a degenerative muscular disease who found new life within the globally popular MMORPG. Charlie Plummer is set to lead the star-studded cast on the project alongside Stephen Graham, Toni Collette, Isabela Merced, Maisy Stella, and Sir Anthony Hopkins. It also has an Oscar nominee at the helm in The Imitation Game‘s Morten Tyldum.
First announced back in 2022, Ibelin is named for the in-game alter ego of Mats Steen, the World of Warcraft player on whom the film is based. Specifically, it pulls from Steen’s blog, Musings of Life, to tell his tale of living with his disease and finding community through his journeys in Azeroth. Focus will also be placed on Steen’s “loving, funny, chaotic family” and the Warcraft community members who came to admire him during his time playing the game. This won’t be the first time that the gamer’s story has been told on-screen, as his life became the subject of the Peabody Award-winning documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin in 2024, which serves as a comprehensive retrospective of the life he lived online with accounts from the guildmates who knew him before he died in 2014.
Tyldum directs from a screenplay penned by BAFTA-nominated Citadel: Diana alum Ilaria Bernardini and The Wings of the Dove Academy Award nominee Hossein Amini. Production is set to pick up in Europe sometime in 2026, with Vendôme Pictures’ Philippe Rousselet and Fabrice Gianfermi attached as producers, alongside Jérôme Seydoux at Pathé and Tyldum and Guri Neby for their Neby-Tyldum AS banner. When it arrives, the film will also, technically, mark a return for the video game franchise to theaters over a decade after Universal’s big-budget fantasy epic flop, Warcraft, made it to the screen. Ibelin figures to be a much more personal film, though, with a focus on the game itself rather than the world.
‘Ibelin’s Stars Have Been Busy Heading Into the ‘World of Warcraft’ Film
The eye-watering cast of Ibelin hasn’t lacked for work of late. Plummer enters the film hot off of Francis Lawrence‘s acclaimed adaptation of Stephen King‘s The Long Walk, while Collette has been busy with Wayward and Mickey 17. Merced’s having a particularly big year, previously starring in The Last of Us Season 2 and joining the Justice Gang as Hawkgirl in James Gunn‘s Superman. Perhaps the actor on the hottest streak, though, is Graham, who recently scored three Emmy wins for the much-lauded Adolescence and is now gearing up for the second season of Steven Knight‘s historical crime drama A Thousand Blows. Stella’s next role in Maude Apatow‘s Poetic License recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Oscar-winning Hopkins debuted Locked this year, pairing him with Bill Skarsgård.
Stay tuned here at Collider for more on Ibelin as it gears up to begin shooting in 2026.
- Release Date
-
October 25, 2024
- Runtime
-
103 Minutes
- Director
-
Benjamin Ree