Halo,Metal Gear Solid,
Gears of War,
God of War,
Bioshock, etc. Can you see a pattern? Densely plotted video games containing epic playable worlds and characters that Hollywood have already spent many millions on developing but so far none of them have made it to the big screen. Despite a lot of flirting, the three-figure millions aren't something that Hollywood believe they can get a return on just yet, even with the franchise heads of
Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson) and
Pirates of the Caribbean (Gore Verbinski) attached to some mentioned. So when Legendary Pictures in conjunction with Warner Bros.
boldly announce in a press release today that they have acquired the rights to the Bioware video game
Mass Effect, setting
Mark Protosevich (
I Am Legend) away with the screenplay duties, well it's hard not to be skeptical that they will see it through. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqJuJTIus7U Having never played the RPG, there's not much more I can offer to this story other than to say that the game is set in
2183 and is a space opera of the kind we don't usually see adapted these days. It's going to take a studio a big commitment to pump in the millions required but if they can find a visionary like
Neil Blomkamp or a
Duncan Jones who can make $30 million look like $100 million, then maybe there's a chance it will make it. Maybe. The main character is an elite human solider whose mission is to save organic life from an ancient alien race who invades the galaxy every 50,000 years. The lead is Captain Shepard of the SSV Normandy, and who ironically enough given his physical likeness and the fact he played Jack Shepard on
Lost - the general consensus on who should lead is
Matthew Fox.
In an article titled
"The Case for a Mass Effect Movie" over at Mindfood, writer Peter Hall said;
There's a studio out there that needs Mass Effect. This is the single most robust, easily adaptable game property to come along in years; that it happens to be sci-fi is merely a bonus for us. Avatar has given Fox unprecedented grosses at the box office around the planet, proving that there is not only a desire but a need for new, big-budget, high-concept sci-fi movies with big splashes of action and side-dashes of sensuality.