In the videogame world, this September might as well be called the month of the Spartan when Halo: Reach hits stores on September 14. No offense to Sony and their Move motion control system’s debut, but there’s no arguing the Halo brand is one of the “elites” when it comes to sales with over $2 billion in business since the first game took Microsoft’s original Xbox by storm. Not to mention Reach has been firmly planted atop Amazon.com’s videogame hourly bestsellers list for at least the past week.
You would think with Halo’s almost Star Wars-like success that a film adaptation would have blown our minds by now. It almost did back in 2007 when co-partners Universal and Fox pulled the plug on a green lit Halo movie tentpole film project after its budget escalated beyond $135 million. WETA Digital, Peter Jackson’s effects studio, was already well on their way into pre-production having constructed prop weapons and a to-scale Warthog jeep. But the rising costs, an unproven feature director in Neill Blomkamp and the box office failure of other films based on videogames sealed the project’s fate.
Blomkamp and Jackson would go on to make District 9 which lacked the Halo brand name but was a resounding success regardless. Meanwhile the Halo film rights remain with Microsoft who still intends to – one day – get the movie we’re all anxiously awaiting to see made.
“We’re still interested in making an excellent Halo movie,” Frank O’Connor, Halo brand ambassador for Microsoft told Variety. “We’ve created an awful lot of documentation and materials to support a feature film. We have a good idea of what kind of story we want to tell, but won’t move on it until there’s a great reason to do it. We’re in no particular hurry. Any film would likely serve as a standalone story and not be ‘a verbatim retelling of the game.'”
A great reason to do might be, oh I don’t know, there are potentially millions of people would easily drop $10 to see Halo on the big screen. The box office market is ripe for epic sci-fi and fantasy tinged films, not to mention there’s the potential for the Halo brand to fade over the years rather than grow. Strike while the iron is hot.
Microsoft has screenwriters Alex Garland (who wrote the first Halo film treatment), Stuart Beattie, D.B. Weiss and Josh Olson working on ideas that could be used to launch a Halo film project. So it’s on the drawing board but is accumulating quite the collection of dust. The earliest we’d see any results would be 2013 and that’s assuming Microsoft pulled the trigger within the next year.
