While the previous Halo mini-series Halo: Nightfall which starred Luke Cage’s Mike Colter didn’t feature Master Chief, there is now word the new Showtime series will.
Showtime’s Gary Levine and David Nevins revealed at the Television Critics Association via IGN that Master Chief would be the lead character of the series and suggested they would be telling brand new stories within the Halo universe.
The series is such an “enormous undertaking,” Levine said, the premium cable network is aiming to air the series in 2020, and confirmed that the series will take place in “multiple locations” on “foreign planets,” meaning that they’ll likely shoot on a studio backlot rather than on location.
“It is a very different genre, it’s futuristic, space-based science-fiction, it’s not fantasy,” Nevins pointed out. “It took us a long time to get the script but we felt like we had something that was really interesting and felt like it belonged on Showtime in terms of its character depth, and it’s gonna be a big show.”
“We made a conscious decision to hire a writer not known for sci-fi and not known for big battle movies, because that’s already baked into the Halo franchise and we will service that, but we also wanted to ensure that we were getting beneath the formidable armor of the Spartans and really getting inside the team drama so it felt like it belonged on Showtime,” Levine added. “As David said, our hopes and dreams are that it will have enormous appeal to Halo fans and will also appeal to Showtime drama fans.”
As for the difficulty of having a lead character whose face you never see, Levine admitted that that aspect of Master Chief’s character “is a key question and an important part of our series, is all I’ll say.”
Showtime had announced in June that Awake’s Kyle Killen is writing/showrunning the series while Rise of The Planet of The Apes director Rupert Wyatt is set to helm a couple of the episodes in the 10-episode order.
Omega Underground has previously mentioned that filming is expected to begin early next year in Budapest, Hungary. The studio locale has been recently used by studios for fellow science fiction projects such as Blade Runner 2049 and Tim Miller’s new Terminator film.
Showtime has yet to set an air date for the series but it’s expected to drop sometime in 2020.
SOURCE: IGN