The makers of the upcoming Paramount+ TV series adaptation of the “Halo” video game franchise had a serious challenge to face – how does one translate a first-person shooter game into an epic piece of cinematic storytelling?
In particular, how do you translate a character like Master Chief who is essentially a blank slate and whose only defining trait is really what gear he wears.
In a new report in Variety, showrunner Steven Kane discussed these issues and how he and the writers did the opposite of what some would expect. Namely, they avoided sticking too close to the games and lent into Master Chief’s blandness – positioning it as the start of a character arc allowing him to discover his humanity:
“We didn’t look at the game. We didn’t talk about the game. We talked about the characters and the world. So I never felt limited by it being a game.
We’re going to tell a story about a man discovering his own humanity. In so doing, he’s invited the audience to discover that guy’s humanity too.”
Kiki Wolfkill, who co-executive produces the series, goes further in explaining why the series lent away from revisiting the games:
“Early on, we were thinking about doing something that could tie very closely with the game. What we were finding was, trying to verbatim stay with everything that’d come before wasn’t serving the medium. It also wasn’t serving the creative teams and their need to express a story and build the world through their eyes.”
One of the big reasons they could do that was the franchise’s expansive mythology tying to dozens of tie-in novels, comic books and a range of guides and encyclopedias. Star Pablo Schreiber says:
“The richness and the depth of the universe was immediately kind of mind-boggling, and incredibly exciting because what it means as a storyteller is that there’s already been a huge amount of preparation and groundwork.”
“Halo” has had a rough and lengthy screen history with six years of development at Amblin Television and a pandemic-split production that saw filming that spanned nearly two years.
At nine episodes long, the first season runs on a budget of over $10 million per episode and Kane estimates he has penned “upwards of 265 drafts” of scripts in order to satisfy practical production needs, existing “Halo” mythology, and notes from the likes of 343 Industries and executive producer Steven Spielberg.
We’ll see the results for ourselves when the “Halo” series arrives this Thursday. The show has already been renewed and is gearing up for a second season shoot.
