Producer opted for Nathan Drake and Solid Snake over Master Chief.
The highly publicized possibility for a Halo movie could have been a big hit. The franchise sold like hotcakes in the Oughts, and a sci-fi action movie would have a lot of material to draw on, but producer Avi Arad and former head of Marvel Studios eventually passed on the potentially lucrative IP. Not even Peter Jackson and Neil Blomkamp could pull it off. That didn’t stop Arad from checking out more videogame properties, and he’s snatched up Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid, Infamous and more, betting on videogame movies shedding their stigma to eventually sell better than films based on comic books. But the movies have to have a character an audience can relate to.
“My problem with the Halo games was that there was no face anywhere,” said Arad, producer of The Amazing Spider-Man reboot. “I didn’t know what to do with it. I thought about it a lot, because commercially it was huge. But when I look at things like Metal Gear Solid and I’m reading the bible for it, and there’s this Cain and Abel story and all this shit, I’m like, ‘Now, that is a movie!'”
Arad is sure Uncharted will be the start of a great movie franchise. “Uncharted was very natural, because it’s about historical things.” he said. “Emotionally, there was a very simple story about a boy searching for something, who had no origin, in a way. He was a street rat. And just like my mother used to tell me that 500 years ago we were princes in another country, someone told [Nathan Drake] something that he could hold on to. That makes for enough emotion to make a fun story.”
Will Nathan Drake translate to the silver screen? “I think what will happen with Uncharted is that it will be the first of many, because it will be so fun and [I think it will be] a very big movie,” Arad said. “The floodgates will open.”
Just please hire Nathan Fillion already.
Source: IFC
