While the big mess that buried the Halo film is long behind us, people are getting used to the idea that there likely will never be a Halo feature film.
But it seems the big pants behind Halo haven’t forgotten and it looks like there will be a Halo film. Just not yet.
IGN quotes Frank O’Connor
“We’re going to make a movie when the time is right,” he said. “We own the IP. If we want to make a movie, the scale of all the other stuff that we do changes dramatically. We make tens and tens of millions of dollars on ancillary stuff, toys, apparel, music and publishing. If we do a movie all of that will grow exponentially. We have some numbers if we do a movie, but it changes everything. It also changes our target and age demographic.”
So like everyone else suspected, a Halo Movie is just too big of an opportunity to make money to pass on it.
So why haven’t they? Well when Peter Jackson first proposed the film he insisted on a budget too big (studio opinion), and then demanded that his protege direct it. Now I am sure PJ and Blomkamp are doing their own little I-Toldya-So dance, but that doesn’t change the fact that at the time Blomkamp was a guy who hadn’t so much as served coffee on a feature film set before. I wouldn’t have trusted a massive franchise like this to him either. Would I now? Maybe, but I would like to see that he wasn’t some one-hit-wonder with District 9 first to hedge my bet.
Either way, PJ and Blomkamp will likely never touch this again because of all the bad press, but that doesn’t mean it wont happen. PJ doesn’t own the property or rights.
So yes, it is about money. All film is. The last time out, they just wanted too much of it, and the calculation against risk just didn’t pan out. Wasn’t worth the money they were asking for the risk on the franchise.
Knowing they could make it on the cheap now and still spit out a decent film, Halo will get made, when they are ready to.
And likely it will strategically be when Halo starts to falter and needs a publicity boost to spark interest again. Right now they dont need that. When other wells are starting to look shallow, they will just refill those wells with this PR boost.
