It’s been a very long time since we’ve seen any kind of movement on the HALO movie front; certainly nothing substantial since the Peter Jackson/Neill Blomkamp project was shut down back in 2006 (been almost four years now; hard to believe isn’t it?) thanks to an inflated budget and an unproven director. While various drafts of the script have been toiled over by the likes of Alex Garland (28 DAYS LATER), Stuart Beattie (COLLATERAL) and Josh Olson ( A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE), there’s never been another director assigned to the project. Indeed, the film has (outwardly, anyway) been sitting in a state of limbo.
Today brings an update: there is no update. That is to say, there’s no rush – no rush at all – to bring HALO to the big-screen.
“We’re still interested in making an excellent ‘Halo’ movie,” Frank O’Connor, who overseas the development of “Halo” at Microsoft, says. “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.”
It’s pretty hard to believe that something like BATTLESHIP – and even more ridiculously, MONOPOLY – is making the transition from game to film, and yet they can’t quite get HALO together. I’m honestly not a gamer, so I don’t have any devotion to the namebrand one way or another, but I know enough about it to get excited by the prospect of a feature film. It’s only too bad that they can’t bring back the Jackson/Blomkamp team that has since produced DISTRICT 9…