Widely re-reported on the Interweb, The Guardian is reporting that Universal and Fox have pulled the plug, so to speak, on Halo the movie. Negotiations seems to have broken down over spiraling costs or compensation for the film makers Peter Jackson and partner Fran Walsh and Microsoft, owner of the Halo IP.

"There had been speculation that the studios left because of spiraling budget costs, which are believed to be upwards of $145m. However, Jackson and Walsh's representative Ken Kamins maintained that the real cause lay in compensation."

I, for one, believe video game adaptations should be outlawed. Everyone from the studios, to the film makers, to the viewers suffer. The world would be a better place if Halo the movie is never made. Microsoft is supposedly in talks with other studios to revive the project. Let's hope they fail.

My personal feelings about Halo aside, I think they've had worse ideas. How would that even work as a cartoon, let alone live? To borrow a line from Austin Powers, "...the sheer mechanics of it are mind-boggling!"

For some reason I always thought this was a rather realistic possibility (not the movie being good, but someone being dumb enough to actually try it!)

The track record of video-game licenses in the movie world is pretty horrid so far. But that's no reason not to keep trying. It is however a good reason to maybe... I don't know... hire people who are familiar with the game as screenwriters, continuity agents, directors, producers and any other applicable film crew.

Frankly I just believe that we're lacking the first pioneer to "do it right" and clue the rest of the industry in... dependant on box office figures of course.

(/still bitter over the the Wing Commander movie)

I think Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil are the best adaptations but compared to movies based on novels....uh....weak.

Well, novels are much easier to adapt to movies because a novel is basically a screenplay without all the movement information. Of course, based on that, movies based on books should be much better. I hate reading a book and then watching a movie. The movie will almost always fall short because they leave so much out. Yes, you have to fit an entire book into 1.5 hours (or 3 in some movies), and that's not possible without taking things out. But they should do a better job at taking out only the unimportant parts instead of removing the important parts that help to explain what is really going on. Try reading Sphere and then watching the movie, for a very good example of that. The movie actually starts out word-for-word with the book. And that was as far as it went... about 2 minutes. After that, half of the important information was removed. If you watch it without reading the book, you won't really know what is going on. If you read the book first, you will see so many holes in the movie that you wouldn't understand if you hadn't read the book. Anyhow, they should just do a better job when they have the story right there in front of them.

Game adaptations are usually bad for the main reason that they don't usually follow the game's story or "world". Game stories are usually too short for a movie, so the movie has to expand and usually creates a new story somewhere else in the world. And, often, they break the rules of the world by doing so. For example, if the game(s) all show that magic can only be used by certain people (let's say elves just as an example), and the movie decides that it would be more interesting if they have a human with the ability as well, then they have broken the rules of that world and the movie will be bad in the eyes of those who played the game(s).

Anyhow, I did enjoy the Mortal Kombat movies (the first one most). The first FF movie was good if you didn't think of it as FF. The second one was awful.

er.... that is awfully debatable...

Well, how's this... it *can* be a screenplay without the movement information if the producer doesn't go and change everything in it. :)

and as movies by themselves they kinda ... well .. suck

You notice that good movies based on computer games are rare. Its similiar to the good games based on movies ratio.

What were they thinking when they made the Mario Brothers Movie? A-List cast, D-list script based on a Z-list idea.

Granted, I think a Zork movie would be pretty cool...

Heh.

You people need to see this litte thing. Decent low budget sci-fi movie using awful footage from old Digital Pictures FMV games. :P

Why should video game adaptations be outlawed? In general, video games are very much like Hollywood movies in terms of content. Also, with peak oil and global economic problem, it's possible that both will no longer be present within a few years.

We'll simply use our bicycles to power the old Atari/NES systems we found in the junkyard. We'll be fit, AND have our gaming fun!

It really depends on the creative team behind the film.

I think how the movie does is dependent on how much you take of the source material. If you try to rewrite the script to turn it into a 2-hour movie, its likely to fail, but if you take a game with tons of actions and dialogue, enough to make a movie, it has the potentila ot make it. Of course, it also depends on how well the development team uses the source material.

As well, I thought the Silent Hill was an amazingadaptation. Very atmospheric and it scared the sh** out of me, for sure. Not just one of the best video game adaptations but also one of the best movies of the year, period.

And am I the only one here who thought that the Doom movie was actually pretty good? Granted, it's braindead and stupid, but I wasn't expecting a movie based off Doom to be Citizen Kane or anything. Now if only they had included hell...

The "first person camera" sequence was pretty good... but up until then... it just didn't look or feel like the base on Phobos that I remembered. I think I would have been more amused if the movie had been more of a "one man against..." instead of including all these characters I didn't remember in the game. Plus there was an unhealthy focus on human soldiers and leaving out a lot of the demons that should have been running around everywhere. Where's my Spiderbot?

I'm critical of game-to-movie conversions the same way I'm critical of movie-to-game conversions (take Alien3 on SNES/Genesis... by all rights... there should have only been ONE alien to fight in that game :P)

I think Doom was okay. It seemed to me like an unfinished movie; like there were a bunch of scenes missing that would have illustrated the plot better. It just seemed like it was skipping things. I wonder what was edited out of it.

I'm tired of the Rock being a villain. He's just not scary. He's Elvis Presley on steroids.