Halo movie could still be a reality

Remember the Halo movie that didn’t push through? According to parties concerned, it was just a simple case of both sides not agreeing on specific terms and conditions. While that could be true, it is definitely not that simple.

Halo, as you are all might be aware of, is not the first videogame to have a film adaptation. In fact, there have been a good number of those kind of films already in the past: Resident Evil, Doom, Street Fighter, Double Dragon and even the Super Mario Bros.

Unfortunately for the genre, most titles mentioned above didn’t rake in a lot of revenues. Could it be that movie studios Fox and Universal backed out of the project because they know their movie history quite too well? While there are some successful hits such as Pokemon and Mortal Kombat, history and statistics dictate that videogame adaptations rarely do well in the big screen.

This could be attributed to a good number of reasons actually. First of all, no matter how a title  becomes big in the gaming industry, the scope of the film genre goes farther and broader than that. Whenever you make a film, you’re actually targetting specific groups in a society. Consider it a bonus if you encompass more than one group and cross overseas.

Another reason is that the adaptations, to be quite frank, are sometimes just bad. What studios do is that they buy the rights to a certain title, then they turn it into a movie. How many titles we’ve loved got butchered in the films? How many love triangles were forced in the actual storyline, how many sappy endings just to make everything all right in the end? What they have to do is work closely with the developers and the publishers of videogame titles.

The Halo movie could still be a reality, if you really think about it. Microsoft‘s Entertainment & Devices Division is currently worth US$ 3.8 billion. What then is a US$ 200 million Halo movie budget for them? Practically nothing, just spare change, so to speak. What if they fund the film themselves and look for a distributor afterwards?

Now, it could be possible that no distributor would take the chance. What about the new movie download the Marketplace offers? Or why not just release it in CD format? Microsoft could definitely circumvent this bump, provided that they really want a Halo movie out.

Via Mercury News

Remember the Halo movie that didn’t push through? According to parties concerned, it was just a simple case of both sides not agreeing on specific terms and conditions. While that could be true, it is definitely not that simple.

Halo, as you are all might be aware of, is not the first videogame to have a film adaptation. In fact, there have been a good number of those kind of films already in the past: Resident Evil, Doom, Street Fighter, Double Dragon and even the Super Mario Bros.

Unfortunately for the genre, most titles mentioned above didn’t rake in a lot of revenues. Could it be that movie studios Fox and Universal backed out of the project because they know their movie history quite too well? While there are some successful hits such as Pokemon and Mortal Kombat, history and statistics dictate that videogame adaptations rarely do well in the big screen.

This could be attributed to a good number of reasons actually. First of all, no matter how a title  becomes big in the gaming industry, the scope of the film genre goes farther and broader than that. Whenever you make a film, you’re actually targetting specific groups in a society. Consider it a bonus if you encompass more than one group and cross overseas.

Another reason is that the adaptations, to be quite frank, are sometimes just bad. What studios do is that they buy the rights to a certain title, then they turn it into a movie. How many titles we’ve loved got butchered in the films? How many love triangles were forced in the actual storyline, how many sappy endings just to make everything all right in the end? What they have to do is work closely with the developers and the publishers of videogame titles.

The Halo movie could still be a reality, if you really think about it. Microsoft‘s Entertainment & Devices Division is currently worth US$ 3.8 billion. What then is a US$ 200 million Halo movie budget for them? Practically nothing, just spare change, so to speak. What if they fund the film themselves and look for a distributor afterwards?

Now, it could be possible that no distributor would take the chance. What about the new movie download the Marketplace offers? Or why not just release it in CD format? Microsoft could definitely circumvent this bump, provided that they really want a Halo movie out.

Via Mercury News