When I play an amazing video game with beautiful cinematics and an interesting or engaging story, I often think to myself that it would make for an amazing film. But I also think how much I dread Hollywood attempting to do so because there’s a 98% chance they’ll make a low-quality movie that doesn’t do the property justice.
This is sadly the current state of the video game movie genre. With awful films like Max Payne, Doom, Hitman and the more recent Resident Evil movies not living up to their names, it’s tough to get excited and easy to be worried about big studios taking our favorite games and damaging the franchise.
What would of been one of the biggest and most ambitious video game adaptations to date was of course, that of Halo, a movie to be based on the incredibly successful and critically adored franchise of sci-fi first person shooters by Bungie and Microsoft. Halo is one of those film properties in development hell, having almost seen the light of day a few years back when Peter Jackson brought in the at-the-time-unknown director Neill Blomkamp (District 9) to helm the feature.
Blomkamp showed off his skills with his amazing work on the Halo 3 video game marketing campaign, where he directed a live-action short which, while in a completely different style than the clean and colorful games, was harsh, gritty and realistic – a style he later utilized in District 9 which he and Jackson chose to work on after the Halo movie was canned by Fox and Universal due to budgetary concerns and fear that the video game movie may not perform at the box office. Blame the horrendous Doom movie.
Since then, we’ve – for better or worse – not heard of any serious movement in the Halo movie, despite the successful releases of several Halo games since then. Halo 3 had a spin-off in Halo 3: ODST, Microsoft released the Halo Wars strategy game and in less than two weeks the eagerly anticipated game of the year candidate Halo: Reach will hit shelves. With the money these games earn, the love from gamers and critics, and the success of tie-in merchandise, where is our Halo movie?
At the MI6 Conference in San Francisco back in April, Content Manager Frank O’Connor of Microsoft Game Studios (previously the voice of Bungie Studios, developers of Halo) had the following to say about the Halo movie in a presentation titled “Extending Your Game Beyond the Package.”
“We’re going to make a movie when the time is right… We own the IP. If we want to make a movie, the scale of all the other stuff that we do changes dramatically. We make tens and tens of millions of dollars on ancillary stuff, toys, apparel, music and publishing. If we do a movie all of that will grow exponentially. We have some numbers if we do a movie, but it changes everything. It also changes our target and age demographic.”
When is the time right I wonder? The main trilogy of games is over and we’re getting a prequel story with Halo: Reach. The creators, Bungie Studios, have left Microsoft for a long-term deal with Activision-Blizzard to work on a new sci-fi franchise. And they frustrated Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp to the point where even if they were offered a chance at making the Halo movie again, they likely wouldn’t.
Continue to page 2 for the Halo movie plans going forward…
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AIDYs, yeah again for the second time, I ask what Halo game you are playing?
Sheesh !!!
Halo Reach! You know, since we are talking about Halo games–I have to say that I did not care for ODST much, but it served its purpose.
For your information, I am like, sleepy…it is 2.20 in the am! I just keep hitting F5!
*yawns*
@AIDYs, ah ok, yeah get some sleep.
^
I’m currently playing Reach myself, and I’m in the second level somewhere. I just activated a anti-aircraft turret, and gained the rank of Corporal.
^
I’ve learned I get the most out of Halo when I play it on the Legendary setting.
I will go back on Heroic and scoop up whatever datalogs I missed or randon achiements later.
I’m in no mood to fly through this game. It will prob take me a month or two to beat the legendary campaign.
And that’s where I get my moneys worth. Not to mention the endless Firefight battles I will enjoy from this game.
Reach is a total 10 out of 10!
I remember watching some of the DVD extras on the Halo 2 SE disc. I vividly remember a lot of the developers saying the reason the game was so popular was that they had managed to create about 30 seconds of really fun game play, and replicate it over and over in a way that would keep people coming back. I think that lends more credence to the argument that the “success” of Halo is driven far more on the game play and multi-player aspect than the story.
Halo 1 had a very vanilla story. It would be really hard not to make a movie that comes off as a Starship Troopers copycat. The only characters that can emote are the AI, supporting marines and the Spark. The main arc for 2-3 could be passable as a basic plot. But again, its hard to really invest in or care about a character that cannot show or evoke any emotion. I would imagine that a movie that solely follows the MC Spartan would be like a movie following the T-800 with no focus on Sarah or John Connor.
I agree that any Halo movie should be based on one of the book plot lines (Fall of Reach, imo) or a fresh story set in the Halo Universe.
I think the real problem with adapting an VG like Halo is that it already feels really cinematic. Adapting books or graphic novels into film is like adding a 3rd dimension to the story. VG game play and kinematics now (especially Reach) are nearly on par with films already as a medium for storytelling. And yeah, it seems silly to spend 2x the money to make it when you can create a game, and then milk DLC until you crank out the sequel.
They need James Cameron to direct this, that would make it sure fire hit, no questions, so long as the script is good
I don’t agree that much with the argument of not making a movie 100% faithful to the main plot of the Halo Saga, i’ve been misleaded to the theaters by titles as Prince of Persia, Resident evil, Street Fighter (yeah, i saw that Chun li based trashy low budget film and i tolerate even more Van Damme’s 90′s version), Final Fantasy (which i still consider the most acceptable movie based on a video game’s concept and that its just because final fantasy has never had a main story), Tomb raider (from which i never expected nothing really), Doom (the most regrettable one of them all), DOA (shouldn’t be mentioned at all), Silent Hill (i do regret this one) and Tekken (which i never even saw at the billboard). Halo deserves to be true to the main plot and deserves to be based on a story that might link one part to the other cuz if it turns out to be a script brought out of nowhere and fans like us don’t know or relate to or already love, then it might become another fiasco added to the big list of failed movies that don’t respect the first argument that make ppl love those stories, the continuity and consistency that make a saga a Great Saga, maybe even bigger than Star Wars. For an instance, ODST’s plot could be an example of what an excellent halo movie script would have been, a prequel like reach or even further behind like when the spartan program began or the most obvious way to go… the beginning of the covenant invasion, anything like this might hit really hard in theaters. We’ve already seen that we don’t need Spartan-117 to be the star (Spartan-312, The Rookie, Keyes or Sgt. Johnson himself, maybe even a new character in a vital time and place of the story) Anywho, that’s just my humble opinion. Thx