Steven Spielberg producing Halo: The Fall of Reach

District 9 is released next week and is director Neill Blomkamp’s first feature film, however if 20th Century Fox and Universal didn’t pull the plug his first big film could have been a movie adaptation of the game Halo. Peter Jackson was producing and his special effects company WETA were working on the effects, however the studios didn’t want to take a risk with the first time director. Blomkamp recently spoke to MTV about his time working on the film, and confirmed that it was dead:

“It’s completely and utterly dead,” he said, with a small, wistful grin. “‘Halo’ is a really tough one for me… it keeps coming up.” Not terribly surprising, considering how passionate and loyal the gamer fanbase — and the “Halo” fanbase in particular — tends to be.

“It’s tough because I spent five months working on it, like 24 hours a day. Not only because it was my first film and I had an opportunity to try and, you know, make the best film I could make, but I loved the creative environments of ‘Halo’ so much,” he said. “The whole universe is incredibly compelling.”

Even though that particular Halo project wasn’t moving forward writer Stuart Beattie (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) who is a fan of the game decided to write a ‘spec script’, which is basically a script he didn’t get paid for and which he will be presenting to movie studios in the hope that it will get a greenlight. The title of the script was Halo: Fall of Reach. Last year Latino Review read and reviewed the script and has this to say:

The script is, first and foremost, a character-driven story about a soldier named John who was kidnapped or “conscripted” by the UNSC when he was just six years old, and then brutally trained to become an elite Spartan warrior known as Master Chief 117.

The script then takes us through the horrific first contact with the Covenant hordes on the doomed colony world of Harvest, and then climaxes with the spectacular fall of the UNSC forward base on Reach, during which every other Spartan is slaughtered.

Now according to IESB a producer and director who goes by the name of Steven Spielberg is currently in active negotiations to develop the film based on Stuart Beattie’s script.

Spielberg is blown away by writer Stuart Beattie’s take on the game in his script entitled HALO THE FALL OF REACH. This coupled with the fact that his Dreamworks umbrella is looking for a big tent pole to help launch their newly independant studio with distribution over at Walt Disney Pictures after losing Transformers to Paramount in the separation, it’s the perfect combination.

Word is CAA, who rep both Spielberg and Beattie, is pushing these negotiations heavily.

If these negotiations work out well we could be getting a Steven Spielberg produced Halo film. There is also the possibility that Spielberg could get Peter Jackson back on-board seeing as though both he and Jackson are working on Tintin together. If things work out the big question will be who they get to direct. Any Halo fans out there have a dream Halo director in mind?