The long-awaited live-action adaptation of Halo has a new release date, as well as a new network. It’s now scheduled to air in the first quarter of 2022, as a flagship show on the new Paramount+ streaming service.
Paramount+, in turn, is a rebranding of ViacomCBS’s current streaming service, CBS All Access. It’s planned to re-launch on March 4, and will offer a wider array of content than CBS All Access did.
The Halo news was part of a series of announcements made from the Paramount Studios lot on Wednesday afternoon, as part of a three-hour event that laid out ViacomCBS’s current plans for Paramount+. This reportedly includes the addition of more than 30,000 episodes and movies from the various brands under the Viacom umbrella, such as Comedy Central and MTV, in addition to live broadcasts of sports and news.
The Showtime network is still attached to produce Halo, alongside Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Halo developer 343 Industries, but will no longer air it. Instead, its current plan is to focus on adult-oriented dramas like its current hit Your Honor.
“We were on the hunt for signature shows beyond the Star Trek franchise on CBS All Access and were thinking, what could be a defining series for Paramount+,” said David Nevins, Chief Creative Officer for CBS, speaking at the Paramount+ event. “Halo always fit the bill, but seeing it, we felt it would work.”
This is an unusual amount of exposure and importance for any video game-based adaptation, most of which tend to get kicked out the door as quickly as possible. (April’s reboot of the Mortal Kombat film franchise notwithstanding.) Halo is preparing to get a network-defining push, Game of Thrones-style, as ViacomCBS tries to break into a streaming market that’s overwhelmingly and consistently dominated by Netflix.
Initially greenlit in June 2018, the Halo TV series is a prequel to the games, set in the 26th century during a war between humanity and the alien Covenant. According to Nevins, the show will explore the lives of the various cyborg supersoldiers in the SPARTAN-II project, such as Halo’s traditional protagonist the Master Chief, while also delivering the “visceral excitement” of the Halo games.
We’re still at it and can’t wait (no, seriously) to bring #Halo to #ParamountPlus and all of you in 2022!???? https://t.co/IWJJZEmedr
— Kiki Wolfkill ???? (@k_wolfkill) February 24, 2021
Halo began filming in Budapest in November 2019, and had reportedly completed just over half of its 9-episode first season before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the production in March. Filming resumed the following November.
Pablo Schreiber (Orange is the New Black) stars as Master Chief Petty Officer John-117. He’s joined by Natascha McElhone as Dr. Catherine Halsey, the renegade scientist who created the SPARTAN-II project; Olive Gray as Dr. Miranda Keyes; Danny Sapani as Captain Jacob Keyes; and Jen Taylor, who reprises her voice role from the Halo games as the artificial intelligence Cortana. Inexplicably, no one has been cast as Sergeant Major Avery Johnson, the best character in Halo.
Other cast members include Bokeem Woodbine, Kate Kennedy, Natasha Culzac, and Bentley Kalu as other SPARTAN-II soldiers; Shabana Azmi as United Nations Space Command Admiral Margaret Parangosky; Yerin Ha as Quan Ah, a 16-year-old human girl from the Outer Colonies who befriends the Master Chief; and in a truly strange move for Halo lore, Charlie Murphy as Makee, a human orphan who was raised by members of the Covenant. So that’s a thing.
Halo has been a tentpole franchise for the Xbox line of consoles for almost 20 years, dating back to the original game, Combat Evolved, in 2001. Originally developed by the Bellevue, Wash.-based studio Bungie, Halo was regarded as the “killer app” for the original Xbox, and the games in the franchise are a significant driver of the Xbox’s overall success as a platform.
343 Industries, headquartered in Redmond, Wash., was founded by Microsoft in 2007 specifically to continue development on the Halo franchise. (Its name comes from 343 Guilty Spark, an eccentric alien robot that appeared in the first three Halo games.) 343’s first game in the series was the 2011 enhanced re-release of Halo: Combat Evolved, meant to celebrate the game’s 10th anniversary.
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