Better Late Than Never, Folks

Steven Spielberg and Microsoft Creating Live-Action Halo TV Series (via E!)I'm not going to lie, I literally do not understand what took so long.  Halo was an absolute monster at its peak, an entertainment phenomenon.  How did it get nothing more than an anthology of animated shorts?  How did anyone look at the wide-spectrum brand recognition of Master Chief and not think 'we should get three movies and a spinoff tv series in the works right away!'.  This would have been so insanely easy to make ludicrous amounts of money off of; the only real challenge would be finding a decent actor willing to never take off the helmet on camera.  No Robert Downey Jr.s or Tobey Maguires need apply!

Now?  I don't know, actually.  I mean, Halo is still Halo, and the Xbox One (because that makes sense as a follow-on platform to the Xbox and the Xbox 360) is likely to bring Halo 4 out when it launches.  That'll give it a nice little bump back into the public consciousness.  It's not like this is likely to do all that poorly.  But the property isn't what it was, in terms of reaching beyond the particular video game playing market, and I don't think starting with a tv series would ever have been the right move.  Master Chief is a hero in the traditional sense, a larger-than-life character with little to no weaknesses and no great interest in self-examination.  I'm not really sure he could sustain a weekly television series.  And I actually am fairly sure that launching a Halo tv series without Master Chief is not going to bring in the audience a science fiction television series is going to need to stay on the air.

Well, we shall see.   And hey, it's not like I'm rooting for it to fail or anything; the more science fiction on television, the better!  When this thing premieres, you can bet I'll tune in.  I just hope enough other people will, too.

Edit -  "The Halo series will be commissioned exclusively for Xbox Live."  Reading comprehension, FTW!  This is an insanely terrible idea, and really does not bode well at all.  It's one thing for Netflix to commission a new season of Arrested Development; they're a multi-platform content provider, with a reach that transcends any single system.  But if this Halo series is only going to be for Xbox owners, that means its either going to be a small vanity project, in which case it'll barely be better than those aforementioned animated shorts, or it'll be a low-budget long-running series, in which case it'll probably look worse than just going back and watching the original Halo's cut scenes.


And just like that, my enthusiasm for this project dwindles to a dot.