Why We’ll Never See A ‘Halo’ Movie

For the past twenty or so years we've seen all sorts of video games adapted into decent movies. We've dealt with the so-so 'Resident Evil' movie franchise, the laughably bad 'Super Mario Bros' film, but what fans of this video game generation were really curious to see was what kind of cinematic magic filmmaker Neill Blomkamp ('District 9') and producer Peter Jackson could possibly do on 'Halo.' Unfortunately we never found out (and we never will).

Plenty of fans believed that one day we could actually see a 'Halo' movie being made, especially when we saw outstanding commercials for Halo ODST ('We Are ODST') and the Halo Reach commercial campaign ('Birth of a Spartan,' 'Deliver Hope') which pretty much showed the potential of how awesome of a movie this would be to see. On top of that, they had Blomkamp on board directing the whole project. It was Blomkamp's dream project, but now it's all over and he's not happy on how that came to be.

One can be under the impression that a movie is truly dead once the former director is free to talk about how horrible the experience was, which is exactly what Blomkamp did in his interview with Wired:

“[Fox] hated me, I think [they] would have gotten rid of me if he could have. The suits weren’t happy with the direction I was going. Thing was, though, I’d played 'Halo' and I play video games. I’m that generation more than they are and I know that my version of 'Halo' would have been insanely cool. It was more fresh and potentially could have made more money than just a generic, boring film — something like 'G.I. Joe' or some crap like that, that Hollywood produces.”

Sounds like there were headaches with trying to deal with the suits from the beginning, especially given the fact that he was dealing with a couple of different studios on top of Bungie / Microsoft. It's never a fun work environment when you know right off the bat that somebody likes you.

Blomkamp further explains the difficulty with working for Fox:

“The way Fox dealt with me was not cool...they treated me like s--t; they were just a crappy studio. I’ll never ever work with Fox ever again because of what happened to Halo."

In the end, can you really blame Neill Blomkamp for feeling this way? Microsoft has been trying to unsuccessfully lift this project off of the ground since 2005, and they had the perfect director in Blomkamp until everything began to fall apart. At the same time, this was before Blomkamp made 'District 9.' The newcomer had not even gotten his feet wet in the film pool, so maybe in a sense it was a blessing that 'Halo' got shelved. It was a disaster since day one, but could we see it again in the future? That remains to be seen. Video game properties still aren't the most highly coveted, and it's a rare occurrence that you'll end up with a hit franchise like 'Resident Evil' on your hands. Oh well, for now fans will just have to play the games and be satisfied with that.