Microsoft's O'Connor Recommits To Halo Movie

Microsoft and 343 Industries' Halo franchise development director Frank O'Connor says that a Halo movie will still happen, despite a troubled history for the project. “There will be a Halo movie," O'Connor tells Harold Goldberg in a discussion published on the New York Videogame Critics Circle web site. "We don’t need a movie. But we’d like a movie. We’d like the moms of gamers to see the movies because they would love our characters. Maybe we’ll even fund it ourselves." A Halo movie project has been discussed since at least 2005, with Peter Jackson attached as producer and Neil Blomkamp tapped as a potential director. That project was officially "postponed" in 2006, though, and has failed to resurface seriously since then. O'Connor tells Goldberg that the project ran in to trouble primarily because the movie studios were not happy that Microsoft would retain the rights on licensed products associated with the movie. “When they went behind closed doors with the contracts, things fell apart," he said. “The problem was that the movie company couldn’t make any money beyond the movie.” In addition to a movie, O'Connor said Halo could lend itself to a TV adaption as well. “We’d love to see Halo as a television series," he said. "Look what HBO did with Band of Brothers or even Rome. Something like that would work because the Halo universe is so vast.”