It’s the flagship show for Paramount+, the network’s new TV subscription service, and will be key to positioning itself as a serious competitor to Netflix, Amazon et al. Paramount really needs Halo to do good business. “It’s not good for my business there’s nothing good that can come from the Master Chief showing how bad he is at Halo.” “I can definitively say, I will never ever play Halo publicly online,” says Schreiber, laughing over Zoom. Schreiber gives the character more complexity and emotional variance than he’s afforded in the games. It’s solid casting, and not just because of his 6ft 4in shredded frame. John-117 is video-game royalty and the role of playing him has fallen to the 43-year-old Canadian-American actor Pablo Schreiber, best known for roles in The Wire, Orange Is the New Black, American Gods and Den of Thieves.
No helmet required … Pablo Schreiber on the set of Halo. The protagonist is the Master Chief, or John-117, a 6ft 10in augmented super-soldier (or Spartan, in Halo terminology) and the poster boy of the human campaign against the Covenant – think Hercules reimagined as a space marine. But it’s a big if.įor the uninitiated: Halo takes place at a time of intergalactic war between humans and a collective of quasi-religious alien species known as the Covenant. If a network sticks the landing, a Halo TV show could be a significant weapon in its arsenal.
Since the release of the first video game in Microsoft’s crown jewel franchise – 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved – the series has sold more than 81m games, generating in excess of $6bn. Will it have been worth such perseverance? Quite possibly. A nd so, after 17 years of false starts, numerous failed attempts at feature films (including a Peter Jackson venture), more than 265 drafts, a reported budget of $200m and a production schedule in Hungary decimated by the pandemic, we are finally set to see a TV series of the video game Halo.