You probably know by now that Neill Blomkamp, the director of Elysium, made his debut with the acclaimed sci-fi epic District 9. Blomkamp was also up to direct the big screen adaptation of Halo, which was set up at Universal with Peter Jackson directing, but it never got off the ground.
Taking on a franchise that big would have to be any director’s nightmare, let alone a first time director, although Blomkamp showed he could pull off a lot of good stuff on a relatively low budget with District 9. Still, as Blomkamp told Collider, if Halo had gotten the green light, “Imagine someone just getting flogged, like some kind of Sinagpore corporal punishing thing…that would be me directing Halo. The only thing that made a huge difference to the situation would’ve been Peter Jackson.”
Courtesy of MrRumbles
Jackson was producing the Halo movie, and he was supposed to be Blomkamp’s buffer. Still, the director says, “I am just a different filmmaker now. I cannot imagine the sh*t that would’ve gone down if the production had actually been made. But Peter may have been able to shield me from it…possibly.”
Blomkamp sees Halo has having a similar mythology of Star Wars. With anything that big, the higher the stakes, and the scarier the risks. There’s always the hope that Blomkamp, now that he has some big epics under his belt, could one day return to Halo on the big screen. There’s a lot of video game movies in the works right now, and if the film version of World of Warcraft becomes a big hit, maybe the major studios will finally be ready to tackle Halo and give the Star Wars of gaming its due.
