Microsoft Wondering About This Movie Thing

Via some considered analysis at Joystiq, an interview at the Mercury news with Microsoft's Robbie Bach. The article touches on a number of pieces of the Xbox business, and is quite interesting, but folks are focusing on his comments re: the Halo movie. From the piece: "Does it make sense for Microsoft to be in the movie business? It's not what we do, nor would I anticipate us ever doing it. So it's a different business with a different business model. We happen to have great intellectual property with Halo that could be made into a great movie. The No. 1 criteria for us is we have to be confident a great movie is going to be made. It doesn't matter if Universal and Fox do it or somebody else does it. Frankly, if we didn't think a good movie would be produced, we would rather have no movie."

Comments

i think microsoft has given up on 3rd parties...

[Aeron65432]

I, on the other hand, would not be surprised at all if M$ jumped into the movie-making. They're not a software company guys...I'm using an M$ mouse right now (I know they don't make it themselves) and consider the past.

Consider, for instance, the Zune. Beyond being a potential flop, it showed the culmination of Microsoft getting sick of 3rd party partnerships and jumping it in themselves. PlaysForSure was M$ intellectual property (kind of) that they licensed out to try and leverage the market. Horrible failure. The Zune is a complete reversal, where they entered a non-MS-dominant market fresh and tried to win, getting directly in there. I think if it fails, it will because they waited way too long till the market was saturated, and not because of any product weaknesses.

Like the Xbox. They've taken industry titans head on, and well, they've won. This was once again direct involvement. Same with many of their video games, ie-Bungie. For those of you who didn't know, Bungie is owned by Microsoft. Direct involvement.

I really think M$ is going to set up a small studio to at least control the project, even if they don't develop it all the way. I can't see them just handing out the IP to Halo to a movie studio and saying have fun with it.

Re:History of Videogame movies

[Flounder]

Grim Fandango would make a very excellent movie. It seems that adventure games would make good movie properties, yet they always try to adapt action games.

I can think of several Infocom properties that would make good movies. Planetfall, Zork, and the best one of all, Leather Goddesses of Phobos!

halo

[Turn-X Alphonse]

"We happen to have great intellectual property with Halo that could be made into a great movie." ...Anyone else wondering why they worded it so poorly? Who cares about intellectual property? You either have a great series or you have a poor series, the fact that you own some legal crap for it shouldn't be an issue.

"Halo would make a great movie, we want to give it a try" would be 100% better since it sounds human and not lawyer based.