Thanks for Mike Peters in NZ for pointing me to this news this morning...
Work is to begin immediately on the live action film Halo, based on the Microsoft Corporation's best-selling sci-fi video game.
Jackson and his wife Fran Walsh will be the film's executive producers.
Microsoft founder Gates described Jackson as "one of Hollywood's most exciting innovators". "We're confident he'll create an epic," he said.
Halo backers Universal Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and Gates' Microsoft have yet to announce its budget. But they said it would be more than the estimated US$70 million (NZ$100 million) Universal spent adapting another sci-fi video game Doom to the big screen.
No details were announced on what Jackson and Walsh would be paid, but Variety magazine said yesterday it believed they could get as much as US$9 million (NZ$12 million).
Filming will take place in May and June next year and, as with The Lord of the Rings, it will include locations outside Wellington. It will be released in mid-2007 and is touted as one of the biggest films of the year.
The screenplay has been written by Alex Garland, the guy who wrote the excellent 28 DAYS LATER and the deplorable THE BEACH.
I'm hoping they make it with mannequins ala TEAM AMERICA. That's the HALO I want to see.
They should get the guys from Rooster Teeth to do a full length Halo film...
Posted by: Raduza | Thursday, October 06, 2005 at 02:10 PM