Preface: El Mayimbe from Latino Review assures me this is not an April Fool’s Day prank.
When I was in Bucharest visiting Hellboy II, Guillermo del Toro waxed about what might have been, had he worked on the Halo movie. He said it would have been an ass kicker of a film, but it would have been one of the most expensive ever made. It was that expense that has essentially kept the film in Development Hell, but now Latino Review reports that Stuart Beattie, the writer of GI Joe, is trying to break it out to at least Limbo. He’s written a spec script based on the Halo tie-in novel Fall of Reach.
What’s sort of interesting about that is that writers at Beattie’s level – guys who get big assignments like Splinter Cell and Without Remorse – almost never do spec scripts. And if they do, they’re passion projects, arty things. Normally Beattie would go to the studio and pitch his take and not start writing until they hired him, but apparently he believes in this concept so strongly that he went ahead and wrote the damn movie.
Beattie’s spec also includes basic outlines for the next two Halo movies, Rise of the Flood and Battle for Earth. Latino Review’s scooper tells them that Fall of Reach keeps the CGI-created baddies from the Covenant offscreen for the first half of the script, something that might allow the movie to have a reasonable budget.
Says the source, who has read the script: ‘For Halo fans, it’s like the prequel that provides all the answers to questions they’ve thought about for years. For non Halo fans, it’s an exciting action movie that provides a clear, concise introduction to a world five hundred years in the future with relatable characters and a terrifying alien menace.’