The Mass Effect movie adaptation was canceled to turn it into an entire television series instead. The space RPG game series, now fourteen years old, recently celebrated with an acclaimed Legendary Edition, remastering the first three games in the series all in one. The trilogy surrounds Commander Shepard, the first human nominated to serve as a member of Spectre: the galactic policing body in the year 2183. While the phrase "Mass Effect" comes from the in-game technology that allows manipulation of mass, like faster-than-light travel, the title fits as well in how the game takes the player's choices into consideration. Many of the supporting cast will die or survive based on how the player chooses to move around the galaxy, prompting every choice to cause a massive effect.
The desire to adapt video games into attempted Hollywood cash cows has been around for decades, with 2001's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or 1993's critically panned Super Mario Bros. film. Recently, however, as video game sales break records, the controller-to-remote pipeline has exploded, from Netflix's upcoming Assassin's Creed series and Amazon's Fallout to HBO's The Last of Us and Warner Bro.'s Minecraft. In 2010, a Mass Effect film adaptation was picked up by Legendary Pictures with Warner Bros. releasing it, but for eleven years, fans were never entirely sure why the project hadn't made it to theaters yet.
According to a recent interview by Business Insider Australia, the Mass Effect movie was canceled so it could be turned into a TV series. The project director for Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, Mac Walters, said that "if you’re going to tell a story that’s as fleshed out as ‘Mass Effect,’ TV is the way to do it. There’s a natural way it fits well with episodic content." As the film was being adapted for Legendary, the recognition that 90-120 minutes wasn't going to cut became more apparent given Mass Effect's notoriety for its wealth of content. Once Legendary experienced a change in leadership, the project pivoted towards television and began anew. Walters explains how this was a huge positive for the adaptation:
When we build out a ‘Mass Effect’ game, we have a backbone, or an overall story that we want to tell, but each level or mission is like its own TV episode. It doesn’t get written ahead of time. It gets written at the time that we get to it. So it gets added to the main story and sometimes the main story gets adjusted because we did something really cool in that ‘episode.’ So long-from storytelling is a great place for game franchises.
This wasn't the first time a film adaptation of a video game evolved to a TV series, with Halo getting the same treatment at Showtime before moving to Paramount+. However, while a recent emergence of user-controlled TV had become a possibility for the series, such as in Black Mirror and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Walters doesn't believe that that's the best way to translate Mass Effect's player choices onto the screen. "It was cool as an experiment," Walters noted, "but I don’t know if that’s the thing we should be taking away from games in terms of storytelling." For now, while a TV series can better encompass a video game's story length, there doesn't seem to be as much creator interest in pulling other staples of gaming into the viewer's experience just yet.
As fans have wanted to see their favorite games receive adaptations, from the upcoming Uncharted starring Tom Holland to the canceled Bioshock movie, Hollywood has put its studios in overdrive to deliver. Where video game plots were once disregarded as superfluous means of justifying shooting up bad guys, the breadth of lore and story in Mass Effect can rival a classic novel. Hollywood is always seeking stories to tell, and the growing video game market only expands both that pool of plots and the name recognition required to get people to watch.
Source: Business Insider Australia