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Frank O’Connor, formerly of Bungie and now franchise development director at Microsoft’s Halo studio, 343 Industries, has said “there will be a Halo movie”.
Speaking to Kotaku after sitting on a panel at the Future of Television East conference last week, O’Connor revealed that Microsoft remains confident a movie will happen at some point.
“Everyone wanted to do a Halo movie, the director, Microsoft, the highest placed people at movie companies.”
“It was the lawyers,” said O’Connor, explaining why the previous attempt to bring the franchise to the silver screen failed. “When they went behind closed doors with the contracts, things fell apart.”
Microsoft’s monopoly of the Halo franchise meant the movie studio couldn’t make any money on licensing outside of the actual movie, which apparently didn’t sit well with the money men.
The experience hasn’t deterred Microsoft, however, and would be happy to let a prominent director put their own spin on the franchise.
“If Danny Boyle wants to make a Danny Boyle-style movie, that’s great. Let Danny Boyle be Danny Boyle. We would not constrain a director.”
O’Connor also believes a TV series from a network such as HBO would work.
“We’d love to see Halo as a television series. Look what HBO did with Band of Brothers or even Rome. Something like that would work because the Halo universe is so vast,” he said.
That said, it’s the movie that O’Connor really wants to see.
“There will be a Halo movie,” he concluded. “We don’t need a movie. But we’d like a movie. We’d like the moms of gamers to see the movies because they would love our characters. Maybe we’ll even fund it ourselves.”
Capcom’s Resident Evil franchise has proved money can be made from turning a video game into a movie, but not all adaptations have been as successful.
The rewards could see Halo catapulted even further into the mainstream, but a poor movie adaptation could damage the franchise. Disappoint Halo’s millions of dedicated gamers with a poor big screen representation and risk losing their support for future projects.
