Paramount+ suddenly remembers to cancel Halo TV show
Two seasons of Master Chief adventures was enough for Paramount+
Photo by Adrienn Szabo (Paramount+)
Master Chief is picking up his energy sword and going home. Two seasons into Paramount+’s long-awaited, arguably forgotten video game adaptation, the streamer has canceled Halo. Paramount confirmed the show’s cancelation in a statement to Variety. Though the streamer contends they “are extremely proud of this ambitious series,” they were not proud enough to give it a third season, where the Halo might have actually played a role. Producers are reportedly looking for a new home for their space marines.
The news comes just as video game adaptations are finally on the upswing. The critical and commercial success of Last Of Us and Fallout has shown these stories attracting fans outside the gamer bubble. The massive financial success of Super Mario Bros. only shows how important (read: profitable) these characters are to franchise-hungry studios. Of course, not every studio is currently in the middle of being subsumed, which Paramount is. We must imagine that a $200 million series no one watched couldn’t be high on Skydance’s list of properties to keep.
It’s an abrupt end to live-action Halo, which took nearly 20 years to reach screens. One of the XBox’s launch games, the original shooter, Halo: Combat Evolved, gave users a good reason to sign up for XBox Live (then called Xbox Network). Microsoft’s debut console wouldn’t have made it out the gate without Halo, so obviously, movie talk started shortly after. In 2005, Neill Blomkamp became the first to attempt an adaptation of the game from a script by Civil War’s Alex Garland. Other big names passed through the Halo offices, too, including Guillermo del Toro, Game Of Thrones’ D.B. Weiss, and, more recently, Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes director Rupert Wyatt took a crack at the show.
All of it was for naught, mainly because Halo fans didn’t like the show, and others didn’t notice its existence. Halo was a bit of a tough sell as a TV star, what with the hero’s lack of face and personality. Being buried under the Paramount mountain on an upstart streamer probably didn’t help.