The Halo movie, based on the best-selling Xbox game franchise, was so close to happening a few years ago. Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp were on board, but ended up walking away to make District 9 instead. And while I love District 9, I would have sincerely liked to have seen the Halo movie come to fruition.
However, while the Halo movie may be dead in that configuration and with those people involved, it’s not the end of the project altogether, at least according to Microsoft Game Studios’ franchise development director Frank O’Connor.
IGN reports O’Connor as speaking at the MI6 Conference in San Francisco last week. He said:
“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.
So, a Halo movie is going to happen somewhere down the line, although definite plans seem to be missing. However, O’Connor implies that Microsoft only wants to release a Halo movie to milk the cash cow that the franchise has become. Which isn’t something I particularly wanted to hear.
If the Halo movie is one of those oh-so-common crappy game-to-movie adaptations designed purely to make money, then count me out. If it stays true to the games, and is done to a high standard with lots of love poured into it, then bring it on.
