Fox And Universal Say Goodbye To Halo Movie

Master_of_Tumbleweeds writes "20th Century and Universal Pictures, the two studios that agreed to co-finance the film adaptation of Microsoft's Halo video game, have abruptly pulled out of the project. This leaves executive producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh without financing or distribution. A ballooning budget (rumored to have been closing in on the $200 Mil mark) and apparent lack of confidence in rookie feature film director Neill Blomkamp are being named the major culprits for Fox and Universal's decision."

Comments

Who needs a big Halo movie?

[Rob T Firefly]

We've already got lots of little Halo movies which, I suspect, are far better than anything Hollywood could do with it.

Re:I'd call this a smart move.

[AKAImBatman]

To put this into perspective:

- Batman Begins was estimated at $150,000,000
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was estimated at $93,000,000
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was estimated at $94,000,000
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was estimated at $94,000,000
- King Kong was estimated at $207,000,000
- Star Wars Episode III was estimated at $113,000,000
- X-Men 3 was estimated at $210,000,000

Long story short, Jackson would have to prove that a video game movie would appeal to a wide enough audience to justify comparing it to King Kong and X-Men 3. Considering that video game movies always do poorly, I can see why the studios don't believe him.

Re:I'd call this a smart move.

[c6gunner]

Yeah, and it's not like Teens go to the movie theaters or anything. Or buy merchandise. In fact, that's why no company anywhere gears their advertising towards teens. It would make no sense, since they don't have any money!

Re:I'd call this a smart move.

[twistedsymphony]

I can understand why. and honestly I dont understand why directors and producers that propose a videogame movie are not beaten to death by the studios.... I dont care how good you are, Halo the movie??? I'd rather see Half Life the movie, and even then only if there is lots of crowbar action on headcrabs.

While it's true that a lot of games just wouldn't make sense in the movie realm. The differences is in the script. In comic books characters are fleshed out, they have identities and personalities, and they have years of history with how the characters interact with each other. For a movie adaptation you can strip the story straight out of the pages, or if you write it fresh you have oodles and oodles of backstory and character traits that you can easily reference for inspiration. Not only does this keep the movie true to the comic's roots (which is important in any adaptation) but it also has the added benefit of keeping the fans happy in addition to giving the script a vast amount of depth and complexity with relatively little work on the writer's part (so long as he/she is familiar with the original work, or does their research).

The problem is that NOT all video games have such a rich history. Games like Mario Bros and Doom in their infancy had a vague Shadow of a plot that was little more then a sorry excuse for why the pixels on the screen were dancing the way there were. Sure newer games have more of a script and are becoming more cinematic but even still the history isn't there, You might get 1 or 2 so-so game scripts to base your movie off of and that's if you're lucky. The rest of the movie's script and character design has to be invented by the writers, and to make it good enough to REALLY capture the feel of the game the writer has to do a whole lot more work to make it worth while for the audience.

Halo is a little different though, not only doe it have 2 games with very SOLID scripts (and a 3rd with the script already written I'm sure) it also has a series of very well written novels as well as a comic book, all based in the same world. In addition it has a loyal fan base that keeps tabs on all the little nuances of the franchise, similar to what you find in other sci-fi fan bases the likes of Star Wars, Star Trek, or Battlestar Galactica.

Halo has more then enough there to write a good movie script that will make a movie people want to watch. It's not the only game like this either, both Tomb Raider and Silent Hill have more backstory and well written game scripts then most games (though not nearly as good as what is available for Halo) and those were clearly far and wide better received films then other video game adaptations of games with little to no plot.