Great Scott!!! HALO the Movie'!'!

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with an interesting rumor, or at least a slice of what could be, pertaining to the possible big screen adaptation of the super-selling monster of a videogame HALO. Personally, I think if all the below comes to pass we could have an amazing movie on our hands. The first truly great video game adaptation. Anyway, here's the rumor:

Hey guys. Love the site. Been a long time reader. Always wanted to be able to contribute something.

I work at Warner-Bros. We recently had a meeting with Ronald Shusett and Daniel Alter over doing the video-game adaptation for this upcoming movie they're producing called 2176. It's an epic space opera that's essentialy a futurisitc retelling of the revolutionary war. WBIE used to be monolith, which developed the ALIEN Vs. PREDATOR games. Shusett co-created the ALIEN franchise and co-wrote the story for AVP.

Anyway, it turns out one of our senior execs here has been trying to ankle and move into film producing and approached Bungie back at E3 about the HALO movie rights. The word from the company was that unless you got the writer and director of the original ALIEN, everyone can go fish. So with the writer/producer of ALIEN sitting in (someone')s office, I guess he who shall remain nameless thought it was his time to strike.

Now the tricky part is, apparently Ridley Scott has seen the materials before. And subsequently passed on doing it. But, with HALO 2 sales having been astronomical, Shusett and Alter's camp has been in-touch with Scott Free about it. What's more, upon reviewing the game, Shusett commented that it reminded him of STARSHIP TROOPERS, which apparently Ridley and him had considered collaborating on 20 plus years ago after ALIEN came out. Funny, considering Shusett's TOTAL RECALL director Paul Verhoeven went on to bastardize Heinlein's classic.

Don't know if Ridley's budged. Or how serious Bungie is about licensing the movie rights. But a HALO movie from the creative team behind ALIEN, and who also toyed with STARSHIP TROOPERS, would seem to be a great fit. What I wonder is if these parties can't come to an accord, why wouldn't Bungie be open to somebody like James Cameron?

You can call me the WB Informant!

OK, back again. My mind is tingling just trying to imagine what a Ridley Scott HALO movie would be like. Think of the atmosphere of, say, the darker parts of LEGEND for the Flood, the claustrophobia of ALIEN during the rescue of Keyes from the Covenant ship and the crazy military action of BLACK HAWK DOWN during the round-up of the crash survivors at the beginning of the first game.

Keep in mind that this is a long way from becoming a reality. In the above email our source says that even Shusett himself is now just warming up to the idea. I think the best thing about this bit of information is Bungie's reluctance to give the film rights to anybody but a master. The last thing I want to see is Uwe Boll's HALO, which would undoubtedly take place modern day, without any mention of either the Flood or the Covenant and starring Ben Affleck as Master Chief and Tara Reid as Cortana.

As for our spy's speculation on James Cameron... no doubt he'd make a hell of a HALO movie, but didn't he kinda already make that movie with ALIENS? You can't deny that HALO borrows very, very heavily from that film... Hell, that's probably a big reason why I like the game so much.

The biggest question for me now is what story would they use? I'd prefer they use the storyline from the first game, where you're just kind of crazily dropped into the action as your ship is being attacked than go for some new introduction to Master Chief and Halo. The second game's storyline just wouldn't fit for a first movie, but I would love to see a GLADIATOR-esque battle on the city streets of Earth from the beginning of the second game.

Anyway, the above is a damn interesting rumor and at least it puts my mind to rest. Bungie knows what a valuable property they have and realize that it'd be better to never have a HALO movie at all than to give the rights over to someone who hasn't proven their worth in a big, big way. What do yo folks think?