14 DAY TRIAL // The much-talked-about Halo movie project has apparently failed because Microsoft, a company well versed in how the video game industry works, has failed to follow the usual business practice of the movie industry in Hollywood.
The book Generation Xbox: How Videogames Invaded Hollywood, from Jamie Russell, says that Microsoft was expecting other companies to conform to its own rules and the tension eventually led to the scrapping of the Halo deal.
The book was excerpted in Wired and one passage reads: “To set up that kind of deal, Microsoft needed to be ready. Most importantly it needed to have a screenplay so it paid Alex Garland (28 Days Later, The Beach) $1 million to pen a spec script. The screenplay was supervised by Microsoft, which meant it was — for good or ill — heavily steeped in the games’ mythology. Still, the project now had a blockbuster screenwriter and was based on a high-profile videogame franchise.”
The fact that Microsoft saw Halo as the biggest video game franchise, when the deal was being made, meant that it expected to get a lot of money upfront from the movie companies, something that they were not willing to offer on an unproven property.
Movies based on video games have a long history of not living up to the expectations of the fan base and have often lost money for the companies that created them.
Resident Evil has managed to achieve success both as a video game and as a movie franchise, mainly because it has kept the two universes largely separate.
At the moment developer 343 Industries and publisher Microsoft are working on a new Halo video game, which will see the return of main character Master Chief and his AI sidekick Cortana.
The game will be released exclusively on the Xbox 360 home console on November 6.