New Warcraft featurette shows off the movie’s Easter eggs and real sets

The Warcraft movie, a fantasy action film based on the popular video game franchise, is coming out next week. To whet your appetite, here’s a new behind-the-scenes featurette from Universal Pictures.

The video focuses on Easter eggs on the set for Stormwind Market, suggesting that if you’re a regular World of Warcraft player, you’ll see lots of familiar elements from the game (or at least glimpse them in the corner of the screen).

Personally, my experiences with Warcraft are many, many years in the past, so the winks and nods didn’t give me much of a nostalgic buzz. But I thought the featurette was interesting for a different reason — it showed that while you might think Warcraft is all about computer-generated special effects, the team actually built big, practical sets — something co-writer and director Duncan Jones also illustrated by tweeting a bunch of set photos a few months ago.

I suppose I should mention that the initial reviews for the film have not been kind. I actually got to watch an early screening and interview Jones, so I’ll be writing a bit more about my reaction when I post the interview this weekend. For now I’ll just say that Warcraft has its problems, but I liked it a lot more than the reviewers did.

The film will go into wide release in the United States on June 10.