Ignore fans at your own peril. Just ask the folks over at Paramount+, who announced last week they are cancelingHaloafter two uneven seasons. While it would be tempting to point the finger at the revolving door of showrunners or a poor choice of format, the answer is much simpler.The streaming service didn’t fully exploit the massive two decades of fandom and cultural appeal of theHalovideo gameand book series.
Solid numbers are hard to pin down, and Paramount refuses to provide solid viewing numbers. That, in itself, is probably telling. If you’ve ever wondered how companies like Paramount get their reputation and whyfans of booksand games get nervous when an adaptation is announced, wonder no more.
The Significance of the Halo IP
For those who didn’t follow the console wars of the early 2000s,theHalovideo gamesand novelizations defined a generation of first-person-shooter players, an alternative toStar Warsfor Millennials. Hollywood had a lot to live up to. Early episodes of the eventual show earned impressive numbers, at least by Paramount’s standards, as Pablo Schreiber assumed the green power armor of the Halo universe’s protagonist.
Instead of slam-dunking thesaga of Master Chief, the series muddled on for two seasons, losing viewers as it quite literally lost the plot, lore fans had devoted 20 years investing in. Budgeted at an estimated $10 million an episode and still looking chintzy at times,Halocouldn’t afford to make mistakes. Spoiler: it did, and Redditors complaining that Master Chief’s suit resembled a cosplay outfit was the least of their worries.
Should you think this is an anomaly, an explicable blunder by the producing team of Xbox, 343 Industries, and Amblin, a cursory examination of game adaptions paints a very different picture. For years,media conglomerates snatched up the rights to properties without the slightest clue as to why the thing they bought was so valuableor how to accommodate the shift from one medium to another. Squandering millions on anexpensive sci-fi epicminiseries, Paramount likely had little option than to pull the plug. The baffling roller coaster ride that wasHalois an illustration of corporate leadership mismanagement.
How Paramount Tarnished Its Halo
Video game adaptations are now standard, yet studios seem to be still tripping over their feet, repeating old, stupid mistakes that folks committed three decades ago. Certain fanbases fundamentally don’t respond well to rewrites, with young-adult novels, sci-fi, and video games at the top. There are workarounds, though.
An important difference between the fan reaction toHaloand the loveshowered onFalloutis that the writers had artistic leeway.They had far more liberty to take chances withFalloutsince it is based on an RPG series, not a linear story with one designated central character.Falloutspecifically appeals to making hard, lasting decisions, branching choices that will affect the whole world. WhereasHalowas already in a bind, stuck retelling the exploits of a fleshed-out character fans knew about intimately.Fallout, at its core, is a game about creating a new character and experimenting with fewer obligations.
How The Last of Us Succeeds as a Video Game Adaptation Where Halo Failed
Staying faithful to the source material is, in fact, a good thing.
On the other hand,The Last of Usvideo game is intentionally cinematic. It was devoid of high-concept mechanics, challenging gameplay, or innovation. It was less of a game thanan interactive movie, to begin with, and we don’t mean that in a bad way. It was perfectly suited for miniseries status and is arguably better off in the TV/movie format, transcending its already lofty place in its original medium. Network execs, take note. There’s only a quarter of a billion dollars riding on getting this stuff right.
A Short History of Botched Adaptations
For numerous reasons, theHalofilm/TV adaptation never came to fruition for almost two decades, with every deal falling through. Coincidentally, the delay coincided with the franchise’s decline as a premiere gaming IP. Lesson two on how to adapt a video game is to strike while the iron is still hot. But even then, no brand-name entertainment institution is safe. The 1993Super Mario Bros.film comes to mind, bearing only the most tenuous connection to the Nintendo game.
Another precedent for theHalodebacle can be found in theDoomadaptation starring Dwayne Johnson and Karl Urban — we forgot about it, too, so don’t feel bad. This low-budgetDoomreboot is generally regarded as one of the lamest game-to-movie adaptations, struggling to recoup its production costs in 2005. One of the film’s stars, Rosamund Pike, acknowledged toColliderin 2021 that she had no clue whatDoomwas, and we’ve got the feeling no one else involved in this film did either based on the final script:
“I feel partly to blame in that respect because I think I failed just through ignorance and innocence to understand, to fully get a picture of what Doom meant to fans at that point. I wasn’t a gamer. I didn’t understand. If I knew what I knew now, I would have dived right into all of that and got fully immersed in it like I do now. "
Paramount+ Halo Series Gets Devastating Season 3 Update…at Least for Some Fans
Halo fans have been waiting for news of the video game adaptation’s future, and the latest update is not what some of them wanted to hear.
Keep thatmea culpain mind because few of the crucial power players in the industry are soupfront about their ignorance. Alas,Halowas but Exhibit B (or C, D, E, or F, depending on how many Uwe Boll and Paul W. S. Anderson films you care to include) when it comes to writers and showrunners fundamentally missing the point. Fans rarely want a radical reinterpretation or update. That might seem like a raw deal for writers and producers who don’t wish to be shackled to source material, but that’s the point of buying creative properties with brand recognition. It’s limiting by definition.
To put it another way, when Disney bought Star Wars, they weren’t so much paying for the characters or logos as they were purchasing the fanbase and merchandising rights.Ultimately, none of these companies are doing it for love, and they must labor that much harder to earn the trust of jaded fanbases who have seen one too manyResident Evilmovies.
Why You Need Writers (and Actors) Who Grasp Source Material
The Witcheris an excellent case of why you can’t slot in any random team of writers. As you probably already know, the writers of the Netflix adaptation openly contradicted the source material and sought to overhaul it to fit their vision, not that of the game or that of the original novelist,author Andrzej Sapkowski. Star Henry Cavill was so annoyed with the alterations he walked after three seasons, echoing the backlash from long-timeWitcherfans. The show’s reputation still hasn’t recovered. Cavill, in all probability, was the only one who signed on out of genuine love for the material. Zealous individuals aren’t just the ones that will form the core audience but the ones that will spread hype and expand the clientele.
The vast majority of the billion people who watched the MCU had probably never picked up a comic book in their entire lives. However, the initial audiences who watchedSpider-ManandX-Menaround 2000 probably were comic aficionados or at very least familiar with the TV shows or general lore.The Marvel movement spread by appealing to those fans first, not alienating them in search of a broader swath of the population who didn’t know the difference between The Green Goblin and The Hobgoblin; the bandwagon effect takes care of itself. There’s nothing wrong with writers parodying or “fixing” parts of pre-existing stories. Just don’t expect to be employed very long because the problem with purchasing beloved stories and characters is that you tweak or subvert them at your own risk. AsPolygon’s Joshua Rivera summed it up best:
“…the Halo games’ corpus of fiction is not a story: it’s lore. A collection of stories and narrative ephemera that’s meant to add texture and context, subservient to the primary focus of the fiction: the games.”
There is hope. Some actors are doing their homework in the same way a method actor performs research.Fallout’s Ella Purnell (or her PR team) showed tremendous savvy when she boasted that she played the video game series and tried to get a feel for the vibes of the morallycomplicatedFalloutuniverseand its various quirks, terminology, and iconic features. It’s hard to argue with the results, basking in love from both critics (who frequently despise video games as an artistic medium) and converted video-game players (who obsess over fidelity to lore).
Unfortunately, manypeople who produce, write, star in, and buy these properties have no experience with the IP. Too often, writers approach an adaptation defensively, burdened with maintaining fan service while desperate to reshape it. In reality, these stories stand on their own. Purely from a financial angle, revamping fan-favorite characters and revising or dumping established plot lines makes no sense, as it destroys goodwill and any chance at sequels or extra seasons.The first two seasons ofHalo, which will be the last on the platform, are streaming onParamount+.
