Halo should’ve never ended up as a mid-at-best TV show on Paramount Plus. Instead of “Master Cheeks,” we should’ve gotten a big-budget big-screen feature film with Xbox’s halo-nuking helmeted hero. And that was the plan. Guys dressed up as Master Chief even delivered 28 Days Later scribeAlex Garland’s script to various movie studios as Microsoft tried to sell the film to the highest bidder. But things went how they went.
Now, however, Microsoft has just announced Xbox XP, a new division aimed at getting cool experiences – be they movies, TV shows, theme park attractions, etc. – made out of its many intellectual properties. And that’s how Microsoft can erase the memory of the TV show you probably already forgot anyway. No, I’m not suggesting that they necessarily dust off Garland’s 20-year-old script (unless it’s awesome, then by all means, do it!), but by turning Halo into the movie we deserve but never got.
Sure, TV shows are great because they’re often cheaper than films and can be stretched out over multiple years, potentially sustaining added interest in the brand longer than a single-pop movie would. But short of making something legendary on the level of Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, the ceiling is a lot lower on a TV show than on a movie, which could make a billion dollars if executed correctly. It’s not that Halo can’twork as a TV show (despite Paramount Plus’s evidence to the contrary), it’s just that Halo is a game with the right combination of lore, action, and established cultural cachet that it would be best served as a big-budget movie. And finding the right people to make exactly that should be Xbox XP’s first order of business.
This is a franchise that has had names like Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson attached to it at various points over the years.“
Canon doesn’t really matter for a movie, because a major motion picture should probably just tell the story of the legendary first game. Not only because it’s a great story, but because it’s already tailor-made for a three-act movie. We start where the game does, waking up Master Chief from cryosleep aboard the Pillar of Autumn as the Covenant attack. Chief steps out, kicks a bunch of ass, and then there’s time to fill in some backstory and do a bit of character intros for Chief, Cortana, and the Spartan program with Dr. Halsey. Then we head down to the Halo ring, mix some Covenant backstory in with more action, and then the non-gamer audience gets surprised with the introduction of The Flood (it’d be important to not give away that twist in the trailers), before things escalate in the third act as Chief and Cortana destroy the whole damn thing.
Look, I’m obviously no scriptwriter, but my point is that the first priority of Xbox XP should be getting Halo on the big screen. The franchise is in a state of metamorphosis as it is, with Activision now taking on responsibility for development of the next mainline game. With a team being spun up and probably plugged into the efficient Call of Duty pipeline pretty soon, my money is on Activision shipping its first big Halo game in four years. It could be three and it probably won’t be five, knowing that Sharma wants Halo back in the marketplace, so my money’s on four (with three-year development cycles after that, but we can talk about that another time). My point is: that’s plenty of time to get a Halo movie together, and perhaps even launch them together for the Ultimate Corporate Synergy™ that new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma would no doubt love to see.
And fortunately, finding talented people to put a Halo movie together shouldn’t be a problem. After all, this is a franchise that, in addition to the aforementioned and accomplished Garland, has also had names like Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson attached to it at various points over the years. Halo as a whole is in desperate need of a turnaround, whether it’s rebounding from the abandoned two-season Paramount Plus show or bouncing back from an up-and-down couple of decades under the stewardship of 343 Industries/Halo Studios. We’ll see what Activision can do on the games side of things, but it’s up to Xbox XP to show the world how serious they are about this new division by turning Halo into the blockbuster movie it was always meant to be.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show,Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host ofNext-Gen Console Watch. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at@DMC_Ryan.
