When it comes to video games doing things OUTSIDE of video games, it’s often not met with the best results. Granted, comic books have had some great success with Sonic and Mega Man and Pokemon, Tomb Raider, and a few others. But that’s an easy media to conquer when done well enough. TV and Movies though have been their Kryptonite. And yet, Hollywood continues to try and make it work. Such as when they gave Showtime the ability to make a TV series based on Halo.
The project has been in the works for years now, and they even had Rupert Wyatt of the recent Planet of the Apes films as the head of it. But he left in February for unknown reasons. Until he decided to spill the beans on why he left:
“I got involved, I knew very little about Halo—same as I knew very little about Planet of the Apeswhen I got involved—and I kind of steeped myself in the mythology and began to realize how much incredible literature there was and the depth of the storytelling, and it all stacked up for me,” said Rupert in an exclusive interview with Collider. “There was an incredible foundation for the storytelling, so it was gangbusters. I was super excited. In short, I think if I had come at it from an earlier perspective from the building of it then perhaps it would have gone differently, but as a director of a TV show it’s quite hard to sort of become a creative architect of a show. I think in a way I was never gonna be that, and that’s fine because there are really many talented people involved in that show who are doing that job.”
He even noted that given enough time, he could’ve made the show work, but it would’ve taken years beyond what the people behind-the-scenes wanted:
“We were still kind of working on that, but it ultimately wasn’t under my watch to be able to find that alignment. So there was a choice made by Showtime which was essentially to push things, and if I had been perhaps been the showrunner then I would have stayed on that journey for two or three years, but as a director of a finite number of episodes, there’s other things I really wanna do. So I was very sad to leave, but basically it wasn’t within the framework that I originally signed up for.”
The project is still going forward, and they have even gotten a replacement for Wyatt. But it makes you wonder what they’ll be able to do, and whether they’ll be able to live up to the legacy of it all.
