The Halo fever is starting to come down now that the new game has been out for long enough for just about everyone and their crippled younger sister to beat it. So, now that the studios have attempted to capitalize on the Halo rush to remind everyone that there was, at one time, movie plans, the truth has come out: Halo as a movie is dead.
The official word comes from one-time Halo director Neill Blomkamp, who went on to develop some of the marketing for Halo 3. Blomkamp spoke to Creativity Online and over the course of the interview clarified some misconceptions.
The first of those misconceptions is that the live action promo shorts were related to the movie test footage Blomkamp worked on: In essence, those pieces have zero to do with the film. Like less than zero. 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. I think Blomkamp cuts short his credit here though. The fact that people were excited over those shorts speaks to how the director might have handled a feature film. After all that doubting, Blomkamp might have been the right person for the job.
Alas, we won’t find out, because the other misconception Blomkamp clears up is the notion that the movie project is still active somewhere. He repeatedly refers to the project as being dead, being dead in the incarnation he worked on, etc. They even ask if he made the marketing shorts out of hope that it would revive the project. Blomkamp speaks: I think maybe that's because I'm closer to the film, I know how hard it fell, and I know that doing things like that was not how you're going to get it back on its feet. I never went about making those little pieces like I was trying to resurrect the film.
So, straight from the director (who was handpicked by Peter Jackson for the job): Halo is dead as a movie. If it happens again, it will be vastly different from what was planned. Considering all the problems that rose up trying to get this made in the first place, when a release could have coincided closer with the video game’s sequel and such, I can’t imagine a film ever coming to fruition. I think the opportunity for a well-timed release is done, especially with that ever-looming strike on the horizon.
