It’s one of the most well established, diverse and cinematic screen universes outside of “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” but it turns out there’s an understandable good reason we have yet to see BioWare’s “Mass Effect” game series be translated to the big screen.
Mac Walters, project director for last month’s very well-received trilogy remaster “Mass Effect: Legendary Edition,” spoke to Business Insider and explained that the story of the games is so massive it’s impossible to fit into a feature runtime.
He confirms that’s why Legendary and Warner Bros. Pictures dropped a planned film adaptation of the project announced back in 2010 and then quietly shelved a few years later:
“It felt like we were always fighting the IP. What story are we going to tell in 90 to 120 minutes? Are we going to do it justice?”
A shift in Legendary’s leadership then led the film being scrapped in favor of a TV project, but the restart then killed the adaptation. Walters agrees that the franchise, with its elaborate cast of characters, dozens of worlds and many races, would work far better in a TV format:
“If you’re going to tell a story that’s as fleshed out as Mass Effect, TV is the way to do it. There’s a natural way it fits well with episodic content. When we build out a Mass Effect game, we have a backbone, or an overall story that we want to tell, but each level or mission is like its own TV episode. It doesn’t get written ahead of time. It gets written at the time that we get to it. So it gets added to the main story, and sometimes the main story gets adjusted because we did something really cool in that ‘episode’. So long-form storytelling is a great place for game franchises.”
Walters says he’s optimistic a series adaptation isn’t a question of if, but when. In the meantime “Mass Effect: Legendary Edition” is available now with another game title on the way likely sometime in 2023 or 2024.
