I was wondering what was next on the slate for do-no-wrong master Peter Jackson. With his success of the LOTR trilogy and the extremely positive reviews of Kong it looks like this guy could greenlight the project of his choice.
So I was a little puzzled when going to IMDB to find his next (major) movie to be Halo?? A movie based on an XBox video game??
Mortal Kombat anyone? Resident Evil? Doom?
Video game movies don’t exactly say ‘box office gold’ to me.
So why did he go with this project? Did Bill Gates pay him off to make a movie for him?
No way, the Halo storyline is great. The Halo itself is really cool . . . planet on one side, machine on the other . . . humans mutating into aliens. I would love to see that movie!
Isn’t the Halo script written by Alex Garland, who wrote The Beach (bad movie, good book), and 28 Days Later? I believe that I read that somewhere (please correct me if I’m wrong… I know you will), and that made me feel a little better about the project.
As for Halo, I think it’s on a plane above your average videogame movie. It’s popularity is unrivaled and people actually seem to get caught up in the storylines moreso than your usual FPS. Not that I expect it to be a appropriate follow up to Kong/LOTR, but to group it with Resident Evil and Doom seems a little off.
The two movies he has listed on IMDB are both in Pre-Production, so neither is a certainty. He may get tagged for directing something else while he simply produces these movies. Halo will obviously be a Weta project so Jackson’s producer title could be largely in name only.
I’m curious to see if he sticks with the Sci-Fi/SFx genre and goes all Michael Bay on us or if he scales back and does some smaller art house projects to broaden his resume. He obviously has carte blanche for the rest of his career, so it’ll be interesting to see what direction he takes.
Last I heard – and someone please correct me if I’m wrong here – PJ has the rights to film The Hobbit. What he doesn’t have are the rights to distribute it. And whoever does own these rights is unwilling to let go of them, probably because they’re holding out for a staggering sum.
On one hand: video game movies tend to suck. On the other: Halo has a plot that is very movie-able (aliens, space marines. My only worry is length. With video games you have a good 40 hours to tell a story. How do you pair that down to a 2 hour movie and not lose a lot of what makes the story good is beyond me.
Because most of those 40 hours are running around in dark rooms shooting at things. The actual storyline of Halo could probably be condensed into 2-3 hours without any difficulty.
Apologies for the double-post, but it should also be pointed out that Halo is NOT a 40-hour game. It’s easily beatable in less than ten hours, and again, most of that is FPS run-and-gun action.
He did an excellent job on the Hulme-Rieper murder in Heavenly Creatures. He doesn’t just do horror and fantasy. The biggest problem with adapting “The Lovely Bones” is the mess of the end of the novel. (Sebold crafts some lovely prose on the way, though.)
Funny…last time I looked, Lynne Ramsey was slated to direct The Lovely Bones. I was looking forward to seeing another film from her.
Damn right! I’d kill to see that movie done by him, with Ian Holm as Bilbo and Ian McKellen as Gandalf. There’s just no realistic way it could be anything but great.
The actual storyline of Halo could probably be condensed into 2-3 hours without any difficulty.