HALO Resurrection? The future of the blighted adaptation still in doubt

Close your eyes and imagine this.

A HALO movie directed by Neill Blomkamp (DISTRICT 9), written by the reclusive but brilliant Alex Garland (28 DAYS LATER), and produced by the one and only Peter “ Middle Earth” Jackson.

Sounds awesome doesn’t it… one problem then. It’s not happening.

At least; not anymore. That’s the dream team line up that Fox and Universal could have thrown together a few years ago before the plug was pulled over budgetary concerns. However, all is not lost… word has reached the internet that Halo is once again making the rounds and has landed in the lap of one DreamWorks SKG Studios…

According to Vulture, DreamWorks is ‘renewing its efforts to obtain the rights and revive the project’, and the suggestions so far all point to DreamWorks intentions to use the six novels so far extracted from the mega-unit-selling shoot-em-up game as the basis for its proposed movie.

And what’s the reason? Well if you’re a whole-hearted cynic who’s looking at the facts the figures then it’s true that there is a veritable gold mine of dollars, pounds, euro’s and more sitting unclaimed for a HALO movie. That’s right folks; lots and lots of lovely money. Take this fine-as-any example of the potential box-office for HALO. The last game, Halo: Reach, apparently grossed $200m on its first day of release and that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg here. Get the gamers on your side and you could probably afford to buy the moon.

Of course, if you’re like me then you’re probably thinking that it would probably just be awesome to see HALO on the big-screen…

Money though has been the fatal attraction for the Halo movie story. It may be the trigger for it’s revival however it was also the reason why it fell by the wayside in favour of Blomkamps DISTRICT 9. It all got a little messy somewhere around budgetary concerns and asking Peter “Middle Earth” Jackson to take a bit of a pay cut… ouch.

Back to DreamWorks SKG then… Apparently the studio’s desire to use novels based on the games, as opposed to the games themselves, is a legal matter perceived as reducing the chances of them being asked by Universal to reimburse any or all of the $12m development cash already wasted on the project whilst it lay in development hell. Clever Mr Spielberg… very clever.

However, this all still depends on whether Microsoft would want to damage a multi-million dollar franchise by diluting it across several media platforms…

Check-mate I would say…