‘Halo’ Movie Dead, Game Still Huge

Published by Jeff Leins on: October 5th, 2007

In an interview with Creativity Online yesterday, Neill Blomkamp declared the Halo movie dead.

Blomkamp is the director most recently attached to this project, after cycling through many other versions including one where Peter Jackson was set to produce/direct. Blomkamp even directed the live-action promotional videos for the recent Halo 3 video game release which gave fans a glimpse of what a Halo film would be like.

But according to the new director, the shorts had nothing to do with a possible film. In fact, in his words it has “less than zero” to do with it.

“I worked on the film for a few months and we developed a lot of things during that time, and none of that has anything to do with the shorts. Long, long long after the film died, Bungie and Microsoft asked me if I wanted to be involved in the Halo 3 promotional stuff…” Then he goes on to talk about the viral marketing campaign and his involvement with the video game project.

If you’ve been following this story at all, this idea was basically dropped almost a year ago when Universal and Fox decided not to continuing financing all the rewrites and storyboard sessions that were going no where.

Now the film will only return if it is completely redone. And if they can find someone finance it, which doesn’t seem likely.

Meanwhile, the video game release of Halo 3 marked the “largest single financial event in entertainment history.” The total revenue was 13% higher than that of Spider-Man 3, the largest opening in movie history. Of course, when you crunch the numbers, the viewers vs. gamers doesn’t match up and Spidey certainly comes out on top, but Halo 3’s numbers are definitely impressive.

In the first week alone, Halo 3 has made $252 million.

Today, Bungie Studios (the creators of Halo) announced they had reached a deal to become independent of Microsoft, according to Variety. We’re not a video game site, so I won’t go into depth, but basically they’re separate with ties still to Microsoft for future game publications and Peter Jackson for an “upcoming interactive project.”

I have my copy of Halo 3 and I enjoy shooting people in the face. That’s my review.