The Halo TV series begins production this Autumn.
This has been a long time coming.
A few years back, Peter Jackson (The Lord Of The Rings) was executive producing the big screen adaptation of the hit games series Halo for his protege Neill Blomkamp, but eventually the budget got a bit out of control, and they worked together on the Oscar-winning District 9 instead.
The Halo project remained in purgatory for a while, passing from director to director, until eventually Showtime (the channel behind Billions, Homeland, and The Affair) picked it up for a TV series instead, and the things finally started to fall into place.
Halo, in case you didn't know, tells the story of space soldier Master Chief and his AI companion Cortana, who are at war with an alien race who have mistaken an ancient weapon for a religious artifact, believing that using it would reunite them (and all living creatures in the known universe) with their makers.
It has the basis to be a brilliant intergalactic tale to be told brilliantly, along the lines of Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek: The Next Generation, especially as the show is now being produced by Steven Spielberg's company Amblin Entertainment, and Otto Bathurst (Black Mirror: The National Anthem, Peaky Blinders, the upcoming His Dark Materials) is set to direct the pilot and some additional episodes in the first series.
Earlier this year, it was announced that Pablo Schreiber (Den Of Thieves, Preacher) had been cast as Master Chief, and now
Showtime have announced that Natasha McElhone (Solaris, The Truman Show, Ronin) will be playing Cortana.
Considering that over 65 million copies of the games have been sold to date, with the franchise said to have grossed in the region of $4 billion, it is safe to say that there is a huge built-in fanbase for the show already.
These great casting calls are a great first step, so here is hoping they can pull the whole thing off successfully!
