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Stuart Beattie writes a Halo Treatment April 2nd, 2008

Latino Review got the scoop on this lit­tle gem — all news is good news for the Halo Movie, which is cur­rently on hia­tus. This has been announced on April fool’s day — so be wary. Though they do boldly say “this is not an April fool’s”:

In an effort to get the ball rolling again, I just learned that big time G.I. JOE screen­writer STUART BEATTIE has writ­ten a spec screen­play called HALO: FALL OF REACH, and it’s based on the best sell­ing novel of the same name by Eric Nylund.

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A spec screen­play is when you write a script on your own with­out being paid a dime for it in the hopes that it could sell

[…]

Stu­art was com­mis­sioned to write SPY HUNTER, SPLINTER CELL, and GEARS OF WAR for var­i­ous stu­dios. His G.I. JOE script is the one that got Para­mount to green­light the $170 mil­lion dol­lar movie which is shoot­ing now.

HALO: FALL OF REACH is a labor of love by Beat­tie in the hopes of finally get­ting the movie made.

The Premise of the script:

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 élite 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.

The script also gives detailed out­lines for the sec­ond movie, HALO: RISE OF THE FLOOD, which takes place entirely on the Halo ring­world, and the third and final movie, HALO: BATTLE FOR EARTH, which roughly fol­lows the events of Halo 3, the game.

One cool advan­tage of this first script is that (like the shark in JAWS) you don’t even see the Covenant until halfway through the movie. And because all the crea­tures are CGI cre­ations, this cuts the bud­get down dra­mat­i­cally and makes a first Halo movie that much more viable. 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.

Comments 4 Responses to “Stuart Beattie writes a Halo Treatment”

Chexwar­rior April 9th, 2008

I saw some­thing sim­i­lar on kotaku on April fools day, only they basi­cally said “this is what the Halo movie will be (April Fools!),” so I think it is def­i­nitely true there is a spec script based on Fall of Reach (hence “this is not an April fool’s”) but the chances Bungie/Weta have any intent to use it are slim.


skin­nyeddy May 23rd, 2008

Fall of Reach is the name of a Halo book.
I per­son­ally think that the films stu­dios are really stu­pid for refus­ing to finance a Halo film. It makes no sense, Halo 3 sold over $300 mil­lions worth. The film (with the script above) would cost, what? £75 Mil­lion? It would eas­ily get the money back and the film stu­dios would make LOADS. Also why don’t Microsoft finance it? they’ve got enough money and if they financed it they’d get all the profit.


D man May 28th, 2008

Wanna know what’s a ter­ri­ble idea? Mak­ing the first movie about Reach therby not mak­ing enough time to chrono­log­i­caly end the story like the games did. If you want to show the fall of Reach so bad, fine, make a pre­quel about it just like the novel did(which makes it even bet­ter because it’s based off a book). Just don’t screw it up so bad that you have to end the last movie before the end­ing of Halo 3.


Halo: Fall of Reach Con­cept Art (Halo — The Movie) August 5th, 2008

[…] Review have the exclu­sive on some con­cept are released to coin­cide with Stu­art Beattie’s Halo: Fall of Reach treat­ment which acts as a pre­quel to the Halo video game series. The image is by con­cep­tual artist […]