Back in June it was announced that Showtime has rescued the long-gestating Halo adaptation from development hell, with the cable network ordering a ten-episode season for a TV series based upon the hugely-popular Xbox video game franchise.
The series is being written by Kyle Killen (Awake), with Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) directing, and during the Television Critics Association press tour, Showtime’s President of Programming Gary Levine has been chatting about the upcoming series.
“The premise for us was always it needs to stand alongside our other Showtime shows and look like it belongs there while at the same time servicing the fans of this enormous franchise,” said Levine. “We don’t worry about the odds. We just plow ahead and we’re very optimistic.”
“It is a new story, but we are being incredibly respectful of the canon and working with Microsoft 343 people to be sure we don’t violate any of that,” he continued. “We made a conscious decision to hire a writer not known for sci-fi or big battle movies because that’s already baked into the Halo franchise and we will service that but we also wanted to make sure we were getting underneath the armor of the Spartans to the human drama, so it felt like it belonged on Showtime. Our hope is it will appeal to Halo fans and Showtime drama fans.”
Levine also went on to confirm that the video game’s protagonist Master Chief will be a lead character in the series, as well as revealing that we may still have some time to wait before we see the show on screens: “It’s an enormous undertaking, so I would say probably in 2020.”
Via Slashfilm