Or at least that’s what Frank O’Connor is telling us. The franchise development director for Halo made clear when consulting the New York Videogame Critics Circle that “There will be a Halo movie,” though we have heard this many times before.
Followers of the franchise may remember the project being handed to Peter Jackson, the legendary film director, before he suddenly walked away from it. O’Connor’s side of the story is that contractual issues sent Jackson fleeing.
“When they went behind closed doors with the contracts, everything fell apart. … The problem was that the movie company couldn’t make any money beyond the movie.”
Apparently the company wanted a stake in Halo’s earnings in other media, but Microsoft’s total ownership of the IP stopped that notion short.
When explaining his enthusiasm about the movie to the Critics Circle, O’Connor told them:
“We don’t need a movie. But we’d like a movie. We’d like the moms of gamers to see the movie because they would like our characters. Maybe we’ll even fund ourselves.”
Why he thinks the movie’s audience will be the “moms of gamers” when his game is rated M and probably most appeals to men of college age and up was not explained. But he did reveal his backup plan if the movie he claims will certainly happen doesn’t actually happen.
“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.”
