Whoa: ‘Halo’ TV Show Coming To Showtime, Starts Filming In 2019
By Ben Pearson/June 28, 2018 10:13 am EST
According to a press release, Kyle Killen (Awake) will executive produce, write, and serve as the series’ showrunner. Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) will direct multiple episodes of the show and executive produce. Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television will produce alongside Showtime and Microsoft/343 Industries. Showtime has ordered 10 hour-long episodes for its first season.
Here’s the official description of the show:
This is huge news. A Halo movie has been attempted multiple times over the years, with District 9 director Neill Blomkamp famously getting close under the eye of producer Peter Jackson back in the mid-2000s after creating some Halo short films, but that project fell apart. In 2009, Blomkamp told us that he wouldn’t return to the world of Halo even if he was asked to:
In its adaptation for Showtime, HALO will take place in the universe that first came to be in 2001, dramatizing an epic 26th-century conflict between humanity and an alien threat known as the Covenant. HALO will weave deeply drawn personal stories with action, adventure and a richly imagined vision of the future.
With that in mind, I don’t imagine we’ll be seeing him step behind the camera to direct any episodes of the Showtime series.
“I worked on it for five months…I put a lot of sort of sweat and blood into Halo. Creatively, it’s very compelling. I love it. But, when you work that long on something and you have it bottom out and collapse…I mean, I got District 9 out of it, I think I’m probably better off because it’s more of a personal film. But yeah, I love the world of Halo. I don’t think I would go back there.”
David Nevins, the president and CEO of Showtime, said that this will be the network’s most ambitious series ever – which is quite a statement, considering these are the same people who aired David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.
Halo has expanded beyond the world of video games before, but never on this scale. Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn was a live-action miniseries from 2012, and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions produced another series called Halo: Nightfall in 2014 (that one starred Mike Colter, who went on to play Luke Cage in Marvel’s Netflix series).
