Showtime is adapting the Halo videogames as a prestige TV show

We’ve written a fair amount on this site about how Game of Thrones has pushed other content developers to looking for big, splashy, expensive genre shows with the power to unite disparate audiences. I’m not %100 sure this is part of that, but according to XBox Wire, Showtime is going to turn the tremendously popular Halo videogame series into a prestige television show.

It’s pulling in some top talent, too. Kyle Killen, the guy behind NBC’s Awake, will serve as showrunner, while Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt will helm several of the episodes. The show will revolve around “an epic 26th-century conflict between humanity and an alien threat known as the Covenant,” which sounds like prestige to us.

I’m not being sarcastic; well, not completely. After Game of Thrones proved that genre fare could also be prestige television, all bets are off.

Hollywood has actually been trying to adapt Halo as a movie for a long while, with people like Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, and District 9 director Neill Blomkamp all attached over the years. At one point, Game of Thrones showrunner Dan Weiss even worked on the script, but apart from a poorly received 2014 web series called Halo: Nightfall, all attempts to get Halo onto the screen (big and small) have failed. Until now.

Halo is our most ambitious series ever, and we expect audiences who have been anticipating it for years to be thoroughly rewarded,” said Showtime president and CEO David Nevins. “In the history of television, there simply has never been enough great science fiction. Kyle Killen’s scripts are thrilling, expansive and provocative, Rupert Wyatt is a wonderful, world-building director, and their vision of Halo will enthrall fans of the game while also drawing the uninitiated into a world of complex characters that populate this unique universe.”

I do think you can locate a Halo TV show in the context of the further Game of Thrones-ification of TV, situating it beside ambitious sci-fi shows like Syfy’s The Expanse, Netflix’s Altered Carbon, and HBO’s Westworld. But can it stand out with so many other big shows jockeying for eyeballs?

Next: Jeremy Irons joins the cast of HBO’s Watchmen series

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h/t The Verge