Paramount+ is spending Game of Thrones money on its Halo show

Hollywood has been trying to bring Microsoft’s wildly popular first-person shooter video game Halo to the screen for over 15 years. First there was going to be a movie, but that fell apart. Then there was going to be a TV series to premiere on Showtime in 2015, but that got delayed. Now, in the year 2022, a Halo is show is finally going to happen, with the new series debuting on Paramount+.

The streaming service is swinging big with this one, spending around $10 million per episode, according to Variety. That’s around what HBO was spending on Game of Thrones as it approached its final seasons. (Although apparently it’s less than half of what Disney spends on an episode of one of those Marvel shows, which is wild to me; was Hawkeye really that expensive to make?)

In any case, Paramount+ is putting a lot pressure on this show to do well. “This is a swing for a broad audience,” said Paramount+ chief programming officer Tanya Giles. “My hope is this expands what the Paramount Plus brand can mean.” But video game adaptations have a spotty reputation. How will the service ensure that this one takes off?

Halo producers “didn’t look at the game”

To start, don’t go into this show expecting a letter-perfect adaptation of the story from the video games. The producers are drawing from the games, sure, sometimes very explicitly — for example, Jen Taylor, who plays the A.I. companion Cortana in the games, voices her in the show as well — but they’re taking cues from a lot of other things, too, including tie-in novels, comic books and guides. “We didn’t look at the game,” said showrunner Steven Kane. “We didn’t talk about the game. We talked about the characters and the world. So I never felt limited by it being a game.”

Veteran Microsoft developer Kiki Wolfkill, who has one of the top three best names ever, explained how the thinking on the story had evolved over time:

"Early on, we were thinking about doing something that could tie very closely with the game. What we were finding was, trying to verbatim stay with everything that’d come before wasn’t serving the medium. It also wasn’t serving the creative teams and their need to express a story and build the world through their eyes."

So the producers were impressed by the Halo universe, even if they weren’t particularly inspired by the run-and-gun nature of the games themselves. Just ask Pablo Schreiber, who plays the lead role of Master Chief. “The richness and the depth of the universe was immediately kind of mind-boggling,” he said. “And incredibly exciting, because what it means as a storyteller is that there’s already been a huge amount of preparation and groundwork.”

At the end of the day, it sounds like this series will be Halo-ish, but not an exact adaptation. The game developers at 343 Studios Industries say it takes place in “the Silver Timeline.”

It’s important that Master Chief remove his helmet in the Halo show

That’s all great, but what will the Halo show actually be about? After all, the main character never takes off his helmet and is essentially just an avatar for the player. How will the team make that relatable?

Well, for starters, the helmet is coming off. “In this realm of the TV landscape, you really want to have a strong relationship with your protagonist character, and to follow him along you need to have access to the face,” Schreiber told TV Line. “You need to know how the character is feeling about things over the course of time, and that goes a long way toward forming a bond with your protagonist. [Removing the helmet at times] felt really important.”

I mean, it didn’t seem to slow down The Mandalorian at all, but whatever…

In any case, the team embraced Master Chief’s anonymity by crafting a story where he starts as a programable killing machine but slowly comes into his own identity. “We’re going to tell a story about a man discovering his own humanity,” said Kane. “In so doing, he’s invited the audience to discover that guy’s humanity too.”

We’ll see how it all comes together soon enough. Halo premieres on Paramount+ on March 24.

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