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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."
Hey, Microsoft ... get Uwe Boll to do the Halo movie. He has an impeccable track record of making excellent movies based on video games!
And oh, IMDB is a den of lies. Ignore whatever's said there.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
The last game movie I saw was Doom and the only similarity was the name, I guess. The greatness of a game is that you can be the hero, you can interact, make good or bad moves, die, cheat... In a movie.. all that is GONE. You are just seeing somebody else play for you. Boring.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
With such Classics as:
Mortal Kombat
Street Fighter
Super Mario Bros.
Wing Commander
Tomb Raider
Doom
Silent Hill
Blood Rayne
House of the Dead
who wouldn't think of making videogame movies; after all its like a licence to print money and all of the games still retain their appeal in the marketplace.
Seriously, if the Halo movie is made I would bet that every Halo game after it is released has awful sales. Videogame movies tend to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs in order to get $20 for the meat off of the carcus. I honestly can't believe that anyone with any business sense would allow their videogame licence to be made into a movie.
Consider, for instance, the Zune. Beyond being a potential flop, it showed the culmination of Microsoft getting sick of 3rd party partnerships and jumping it in themselves. PlaysForSure was M$ 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.
I think they already made that movie anyway. It had like Ryan Philiipe in it or something. Antitrust maybe?
"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.
I like muppets.