No More Games - Microsoft Announces Halo: The Movie

Microsoft have completed the script for the movie version of the Xbox game Halo, and it looks likely that Universal and Fox will team up to make the ‘run around and shoot the aliens’ movie.

For a while, it looked like the Halo movie would never get off the ground, as Microsoft were being very aggressive with their terms. For starters, they said that the budget had to be at least $75 million - not including actor and director fees, plus $10 million paid upfront just for the rights.

Why are they bothering? The Halo film’s going to be rubbish anyway. Or is it?

Usually, films about computer games are guff of the very highest calibre. There was the Super Mario Brothers film starring Bob Hoskins, which made the typical movie error of skimping on making sets and basing it in the ‘real’ world.

Or the Streetfighter movie, so terrible that Kylie decided never to star in another film ever again. Or Mortal Kombat. Or Mortal Kombat 2. Or Mortal Kombat 3. Imagine being in the meeting when they decided that they should capitalise on the red-hot success of Mortal Kombat 2 with another Mortal Kombat film. Now imagine being in a more ridiculous meeting. You can’t, can you?

The Resident Evil movies were fairly successful because the
makers realised that computer game-playing geekboys would like nothing
more than to see a girl’s minge in a cinema.

Similarly the most success of the Tomb Raider film was more down to the strategic placing of a couple of chicken fillets inside Angelina Jolie’s wetsuit than anything else.

So, it doesn’t look too great for Halo: The Movie. However, hope arrives in the form of Alex Garland (Books), the writer of 28 Days Later, ‘nice-book-shame-about the film’ The Beach and the wonderful novel The Tesseract.

He’s written the script for the Halo film. He knows his way
around a story, so unless Fox and Universal try to save on the budget by hiring
a bunch of useless actors and a halfwit director, there’s a flicker of
a hope that this might be the first-ever decent computer game
adaptation.

And don’t forget that Halo is one of the most popular games of all time, so there will be more fans willing the movie not to fail.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

[story by Stuart Heritage]