The StarCraft, Overwatch, and Diablo series were in development, but Blizzard sued Netflix for poaching their employee, as revealed by journalist Jason Schreier in his new book.
Blizzard
Industry insider and journalist Jason Schreier has his new book on the 33-year history of Blizzard called Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment coming on October 8. Recently, he shared a sneak peek into the book by answering the audience's questions about Blizzard and talking about the company's internal processes and issues. One of the questions was related to the cinematic adaptation of Blizzard projects – and it turned out that it could have happened.
One of the players asked why Blizzard hadn't branched into movies, TV, or animation and if there had been such plans, considering that the Warcraft film was released in 2016. Schreier answered: "The book reveals that they had a series in development with Netflix for StarCraft, Overwatch, and Diablo." However, he then explained that Activision Blizzard accused Netflix of luring their employee, CFO Spencer Neumann, when he still had an ongoing contract with the video game company.
Neumann had a three-year contract with Activision Blizzard signed in 2017, but in autumn 2018, the streaming platform allegedly hired him away, and in January 2019, he became the CFO at Netflix.
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