Sam Raimi‘s Oz The Great and Powerful is hitting theaters this weekend, but long before the film’s production, the director was attached to direct Spider-Man 4 – which eventually got the reboot treatment directed by Marc Webb – and World of Warcraft – which eventually went to Duncan Jones.

During the press rounds for Oz The Great and Powerful, Raimi addressed those projects that got passed on or rebooted.

On the subject of Spider-Man 4, Raimi said that he just couldn’t hand in a proper script on time and that he wanted to end his Spider-Man franchise on a high note, especially after the way Spider-Man 3 ended. By the way that the relationship between him and Sony wasn’t as heated as some make it out to be, according to Raimi.

After helming the underrated sci-fi drama Moon and the equally exciting Source Code, Duncan Jones is going to take on a tentpole film, a first in his directing career. THR reports that Jones has signed on to direct Warcraft, based on the popular Blizzard MMORPG game World of Warcraft.

The project will be under the Legendary Pictures banner, with Thomas Tull and Jon Jashni producing. Also producing are Atlas Entertainment’s Charles Roven and Alex Gartner.

When it comes to massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, unpredictability comes with the territory. When you have that many people playing, you never know what someone’s going to do next.

Some hackers recently proved this with a bit of chaos. They unleashed some sort of mass death hack that saw thousands of players’ characters in multiple realms drop dead inexplicably. Blizzard fixed the issue within a few hours, but by then, many had fallen, and plenty of new YouTube videos had been uploaded to show the carnage.

Check out some of the videos below, as well as statements from both Blizzard and one of the hackers claiming responsibility for this…event.

With the newest World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria set to launch on September 25th, Blizzard Entertainment released Patch 5.04 this Tuesday. This patch paves the way for Pandaria. The new Talent System overhaul has been implemented, and it is a world of difference from any previous talent system that World of Warcraft has had.

Out are the days of cookie-cutter, set-in-stone builds and in are the days of flexible builds. Also new, changing a talent can be done on-the-fly. This means character builds can be modified mid-raid or mid-PvP battle, allowing for quick strategic changes depending upon what the situation may call for.

On August 28th when Blizzard Entertainment releases patch 5.0.4 for World of Warcraft, for the first time ever all races will become accessible to Warcraft players regardless of which version of the game they own. This means that even if you do not own any of the Warcraft expansions, you will still be able to roll a character using one of the races made available by them. This quantum shift in race accessibility will even include the Pandaren race, who become available on September 25th when Mists of Pandaria is released.

This begs question, which new race will you roll first?