The news that Halo’s TV adaptation isn’t necessarily dead yet is just further evidence that the troubled small screen version of the iconic video game franchise needs to fix its biggest issue to succeed. There are few video game franchises as famous as Halo, and the historic popularity of the Xbox series of sci-fi military games means that players always wanted to see a screen version of the series. However, this proved easier said than done as Halo’s movie/TV show spent over a decade and a half in Development Hell from 2005 until 2022.
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As far back as 2005, 28 Days Later scribe Alex Garland wrote a script for a movie adaptation of Halo, set to be directed by Guillermo del Toro or, according to later reports, District 9’s Neil Blomkamp. As if Garland’s underrated sci-fi flops Annihilation and Dredd weren’t enough, his unproduced Halo movie script was rewritten by DB Weiss of Game of Thrones and Josh Olson, screenwriter of the underrated DC Comics movie A History of Violence, in 2008. Despite supposedly securing Peter Jackson as an executive producer, this second version of the Halo movie adaptation also fell apart.
Halo’s TV Show Needs To Finally Just Adapt The Games Instead of Rewriting Them
When Halo’s TV show adaptation was finally announced in 2013, with Steven Spielberg now on board as an executive producer, gamers the world over breathed a sigh of relief that proved to be comically premature. The show’s planned 2015 release was rescheduled for 2019, then delayed until 2020, then finally delayed until 2022. When Halo’s TV show finally arrived in 2022, the words “Crushing disappointment” rang across many corners of the Internet. Like the source games, Halo‘s story was set in the 26th century, and its plot centred on the war between the Covenant and the United Nations Space Command.
As in the games, the show’s villainous alliance of alien races was still trying to destroy humanity, and the supersoldier Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 was still Halo’s hero. However, the fact that Pablo Schreiber’s version of the protagonist spent almost all his screen time unmasked was just the first of many inscrutable decisions that ensured the show never quite felt true to the games. Although Halo’s screen adaptation did flesh out the lore of the game series further, the series delved a little too deeply into exposition.
Halo’s Adaptation Struggles Have Been A True Unforced Error
As such, it took until season 2 for things to really get going and the show to finally feel something like a faithful adaptation of the games. Of course, after talking 17 years to reach screens, Halo was then promptly cancelled just as the show was starting to live up to its premise. Like so many expensive sci-fi shows, the series ended up feeling like a false start that was made worse because it was brimming with unfulfilled potential.
That is why it was so exciting when Xbox’s chief content officer Matt Booty said at the Xbox Showcase that, “Halo, first and foremost, is one of our biggest franchises. It’s iconic to Xbox, and we’re certainly going to invest going forward.” These comments proved that the Halo series could still return to the small screen in the future and live up to its potential, provided the show finally does what viewers have been crying out for all along and faithfully adapts the story of the games themselves, instead of their franchise ephemera.
