IESB are report­ing that Steven Spiel­berg may be tak­ing up the Halo movie gig, a cou­ple years after his Tintin pal Peter Jack­son dropped the project. There’s no con­clu­sive proof and the rumor sources are “stu­dio exec­u­tives” and “close ties to CAA”; what do the rumors say?

“[Steven Spiel­berg is] cur­rently in active nego­ti­a­tions to develop the fea­ture film adaptation”

The story is hyped up with details of Spielberg’s video game hob­bies and sug­gested fas­ci­na­tion of the lat­est Stu­art Beat­tie “Fall of reach” script, aka a Mas­ter Chief back story orig­i­nally writ­ten in 2001 by Erik Nylund. We’re tak­ing this one with a grain of salt. BUT, it is good to see the Halo movie back in the lime­light — one day, maybe, it will hit the big screens.

IESB has learned exclu­sively (believe me this is solid and I’ve con­firmed it three times over with stu­dio exec­u­tives and our close ties to CAA) that one of the biggest pro­duc­ers in Hol­ly­wood his­tory is cur­rently in active nego­ti­a­tions to develop the fea­ture film adap­ta­tion and no it’s not Jerry Bruck­heimer or Peter Jack­son. It’s the man behind Jaws, E.T., Indi­ana Jones and Trans­form­ers, Mr. Steven Spielberg.

Spiel­berg is blown away by writer Stu­art Beattie’s take on the game in his script enti­tled HALO THE FALL OF REACH. This cou­pled with the fact that his Dream­works umbrella is look­ing for a big tent pole to help launch their newly inde­pen­dant stu­dio with dis­tri­b­u­tion over at Walt Dis­ney Pic­tures after los­ing Trans­form­ers to Para­mount in the sep­a­ra­tion, it’s the per­fect combination.

Latino Review got the scoop on this lit­tle gem — all news is good news for the Halo Movie, which is cur­rently on hia­tus. This has been announced on April fool’s day — so be wary. Though they do boldly say “this is not an April fool’s”:

In an effort to get the ball rolling again, I just learned that big time G.I. JOE screen­writer STUART BEATTIE has writ­ten a spec screen­play called HALO: FALL OF REACH, and it’s based on the best sell­ing novel of the same name by Eric Nylund.

HALO: FALL OF REACH is a labor of love by Beat­tie in the hopes of finally get­ting the movie made.

The Premise of the script:

The script is, first and fore­most, a character-driven story about a sol­dier named John who was kid­napped or “con­scripted” by the UNSC when he was just six years old, and then bru­tally trained to become an élite Spar­tan war­rior known as Mas­ter Chief 117.

One cool advan­tage of this first script is that (like the shark in JAWS) you don’t even see the Covenant until halfway through the movie. And because all the crea­tures are CGI cre­ations, this cuts the bud­get down dra­mat­i­cally and makes a first Halo movie that much more viable. For Halo fans, it’s like the pre­quel that pro­vides all the answers to ques­tions they’ve thought about for years. For non Halo fans, it’s an excit­ing action movie that pro­vides a clear, con­cise intro­duc­tion to a world five hun­dred years in the future with relat­able char­ac­ters and a ter­ri­fy­ing alien menace.

Who hon­estly knows what is going on with the Halo Movie adap­ta­tion at the moment? Last week Neill Blomkamp came out and stated that the movie in its cur­rent form was dead and that we shouldn’t look for­ward to a Halo Movie any time soon.

I’d seen sto­ries like this before so I was a lit­tle reluc­tant to post the news arti­cle, that and it would mean the end of this blog, which isn’t some­thing I look for­ward to. So I held on with what lit­tle hope I had left.

Seems like my hope wasn’t entirely in vain. This week Peter Jackson’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Ken Kamins spoke to Com­puter and Video games. It first out­lines the das­tardly ways that Fox and Uni­ver­sal attempted to force the film mak­ers to a less than oppor­tune deal. Most impor­tantly how­ever, he states that every­body is supremely con­fi­dent in Neill and that pro­duc­tion is still under­way and that give Halo 3’s $300 mil­lion in sales a num­ber of movie stu­dios have renewed inter­est.

RUMOR has it that Alex Garland’s treat­ment of the Halo sub­ject has been leaked onto the inter­net, via Bit­Tor­rent in a PDF for­mat. At least this is the case made by 1Up. They claim that the script itself, found via one of their forum mem­bers, shows a num­ber of par­al­lels with the Latino Script review from Decem­ber 2005 (back when the movie was in development).

1Up have pasted some pages from the script show­ing the intro­duc­tion and intended finale and setup for a sequel. Warn­ing, SPOILERS herein.

This ver­sion has since been aban­doned, pro­duc­tion instead opt­ing for a rewrite by D.B.Weiss.

Many mis­lead­ing reports have been filed about the pur­ported re-firing of the Halo Movie engines. These reports assumed that a Halo GAME and FRANCHISE dis­tri­b­u­tion deal, made by Fox, extended to the movie. This is not the case and NO MOVIE DEVELOPMENT plans have as YET been confirmed.

This deal does how­ever look favourably on the Halo movie process and could ini­ti­ate the future devel­op­ment. Though, as it stands, we are still not mov­ing any­where, our igni­tion is firmly set to off.

Rumors are abound with reports that a third screen­writer is being called upon to look over and mod­ify the exist­ing Halo screen­play. Vari­ety reports that “A His­tory of Vio­lence” writer Josh Olson is in the mix.

It seems Microsoft (via the Xbox​.com web­site) have removed the Neill Blomkamp announce­ment, the pre­vi­ous URL now leads to a 404 page error. There can be a num­ber of expla­na­tions for this:

The announce­ment may have been pre­ma­ture
This could sug­gest the con­tract details or some other finer points had not been con­cluded at the time of pub­li­ca­tion. This would call for a retrac­tion of the state­ment to con­form with a con­fi­den­tial­ity clause.
The arti­cle was wrong
It’s pos­si­ble that some­one could have screwed up or alter­na­tively mes­sages may have been mixed. Neill Blomkamp’s role may not be as big as direc­tor, he could just be run­ning the spe­cial effects depart­ment. But con­sid­er­ing the AICN inter­view and the words from Blomkamp’s mouth this is highly unlikely.
The site messed up
It’s just a prob­lem with the site — I like this explanation.

Well this is all just spec­u­la­tion; such activ­i­ties are con­fus­ing and in the past have pointed to PR dis­as­ters etc. My hunch is that this is noth­ing but I bring it to your atten­tion any­way just in case.

News has been short of late. With Microsoft’s attempts to force this into cin­e­mas as fast as humanly pos­si­ble they must surely be dis­ap­pointed at the rate the sched­ule is pro­gress­ing. Or maybe they have re-evaluated and re-calculated the pro­duc­tion times of both game and movie and may now opt for a release that is not simul­ta­ne­ous, or even within the same year. *shrug*

How­ever, it seems Movies Online has a brief update con­cern­ing the sta­tus of the script. They cat­e­gor­i­cally state that Alex Gar­land, the acclaimed British writer, is no longer pro­vid­ing the drafts for the adap­ta­tion, but D.B. Weiss is instead on his sec­ond. How good is he? What has he writ­ten before? Who knows, his IMDB page is blank. Let’s hope he is not a patsy to the whims and wills of the mega­corps. And that may be true if he did indeed only com­plete the game on Easy! 1Up also has a fea­ture here: 1Up and of course the full inter­view is here Game­Set­Watch

Some other news you may have come across recently are the rumours that Den­zel Wash­ing­ton is to be cast as Mas­ter Chief. Orig­i­nat­ing from Dark Hori­zons, to quote: “Halo: Lat­est rumours have Den­zel Wash­ing­ton as the favourite for Mas­ter Chief.” That is all. This is noth­ing but rumour and likely entirely unsub­stan­ti­ated. I’d per­son­ally see him as a Sarge. Fol­low­ing this inter­net flurry there was a quick and brief rebut­tal which appeared on AICN stat­ing: “Mas­ter Chief will not be remov­ing his hel­met at any point dur­ing the film. (…) Can you see Den­zel Wash­ing­ton sign­ing up for a film where he won’t be seen at any point?”

Peace Out.