Peter Jackson to Direct Halo Movie

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Author: Darien Bagnato

Started: September 25, 2005, 1:50:35 am

Target: Bungie

Category: Entertainment & Media

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TAKEN FROM http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST-15016-2578-4-6-x

RUMOR #1: Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has signed on to direct the Halo movie.

Source: The forums at Bollfans.com, a site dedicated to German film director Uwe Boll.

The official story: See below.

What we heard: Late last week, audible gasps of horror were heard around the GameSpot offices when the Internet Movie Database began listing Boll as the director of the forthcoming big-budget film version of Halo. Boll has become notorious for his critically savaged movie versions of beloved games, which include House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and the dismal-looking BloodRayne, due next January. Mercifully, that rumor was dispelled by Bollfans.com, which bluntly states on its home page that "Uwe Boll will not direct Halo." (IMDb has since removed his name from the Halo movie page.)

But a far more tantalizing nugget lay in the Bollfans.com forums, where someone claming to be Bungie Studios audio director Marty O'Donnell posted the following message on Saturday, 9/17: "You'll be pleased to know that we have accepted a Director by the name of Peter Jackson in regards to the Halo Movie project....I.M.D.B. will be updated shortly to correcti (sic) I.M.D.B, and later this week we will release a statement over at our website (http://www.bungie.net) to help clarify this matter further." (Emphasis in the original.)

While no announcement has yet been made by Bungie or Microsoft, the thought of Jackson directing Halo would make many a geek's head explode. Besides his helming the Oscar-winning, $2.3 billion-grossing Lord of the Rings trilogy--which has just the sort of epic scope one hopes the Halo movie will have--Jackson is an avid gamer. After playing the cult hit Beyond Good & Evil, he hired its designer, Michel Ancel (Rayman), to oversee the game version of his forthcoming King Kong remake.

There are also plenty of business reasons why Jackson would direct Halo. Universal, which is cofinancing the movie with Fox, is also bankrolling and distributing King Kong. Jackson owns the Oscar-winning special effects company Weta Digital, which has extensive experience with creating fearsome creatures akin to Halo's Elites, Brutes, and Grunts. (Jackson's horror background could also come in handy for re-creating the flood.) The green valleys and lush terrain of New Zealand, where Jackson filmed Rings, would make a nice stand-in for Halo's surface landscape. Lastly, there's the matter of the country's favorable exchange rate, which made shooting Rings much less expensive than it would have been if it had been made in the States--and the same could be done for Halo.

But is the Jackson-Halo post a real leak or just a cruel hoax? At first, it looked like the former, since the poster took one of O'Donnell's nicknames, Marty the Elder, for an avatar. Also, according to his Bungie bio, O'Donnell hails from Vienna, Austria, which could explain what he was doing visiting a primarily German-language Web site. The problem is, all that information is posted on the Bungie site and can be seen by anyone. In this case, it was seen by someone with a sick sense of humor, because, according to a rep from Universal, the Peter Jackson rumor is "completely untrue."

Bogus or not bogus?: Bogus, sadly.

Please cause Bungie to change this to be truth.
We want Peter Jackson to create something of such epic proportions as the Halo movie, someone with experience. Just think of what he did with Lord of the Rings.