Bear with me, this will take some explanation:
I think "Wing Commander" is more an example of what happens when a company pretends to listen to it's consumers, and they decides it's going to do whatever the frak it wants to, and we better like it.
A current example of this would be Bioware and "Dragon Age", albiet it's not as long running a franchise as "Wing Commander" was. With plenty of time on the clock to push up the game and make radical changes if they wanted to, they decided to do some reveals about what they wanted to do with this "Hawke" character, basically the removal of most of the character creation options that made "Origins" a big hit with people wanting serious RPers. The response was as far as I saw, overwhelmingly negative, and this includes on their own forums which I checked out. There were of course some positive and very positive responses, and a lot of "I trust Bioware" responses, but by and large any serious responses were "this blows chips, we want multiple origins, racial selection, and more involved character creation". Indeed I was one of those pointing out that there is no reason to remove those aspects due to voice work since "Saint's Row 2" proved that they could have multiple voice actors read the script in differant ways so people could pick voices for differant races and backrounds and so on.
Bioware did not delay the game to modify things for more player choice, or in any way respond positively to the fan responses that it went out courting. Rather it blindly pushed on with what it was going to do. The problem with game companies is when they start determining what is signal and what is noise (so to speak) and overlook the obvious.
I see a lot of direct parallels with Wing Commander. It wasn't the Wing Commander movie that killed the series. It was when Origin started putting Mark Hamil into the role of the protaganist, removing the generic pilot (that you could name) and the whole "the hero is you" bit that a lot of people liked. This desician, and other ones cannonballed the series. If you believe the hype and a lot of reviews these games were going strong and you'd be justified to wonder "WTF happened, it must have been the movie", but if you were part of the fan base at the time, and on a lot of the forums and stuffm the players were actually fairly against what was going on, including changes to the gameplay to make it "more realistic" in the way ships handled and so on. Origin went right ahead to play with their celebrity actors and big movie productions, and the fans eventually decided "nope, not anymore. You know we made two previous games sell well that weren't what we wanted due to loyalty, take these last ones and stick them where the sun doesn't shine".
The Bloodrayne franchise was also suspected to have died due to bad movies, albiet in that case while blasted the Bloodrayne movie actually sold well enough to get a sequel (which is unusual for Uwe Boll). The death of that franchise, and lack of sales of it's sequel (which was clumsily released) seems to be connected to legal battles (which they lost) over similarities between Rayne and a 2100AD character called "Durham Red".
The point of all this rambling (which I am trying to reinforce with examples) is that I don't think a movie has ever killed a franchise. It's game developers and producers who kill franchises. After all if you have the installed fan base to warrent a movie, they aren't all going to turn just because of the movie, no more than characters like "Spider Man" and "Doctor Strange" disappeared due to horrendous movies made in the 1970s.
I'm not a big Halo fan, but if Microsoft is concerned about that killing the franchise I think they need to seriously consider their thought processes. But then again we still see the same things happening with games because game developers and producers always need some way of blaming the consumers rather than themselves for making bad desicians.
The most you can expect out of Halo, even with Speilburg, is a mediocre movie. Part of the whole point of Halo is that it's pretty typical military sci-fi as a video game. Nothing you saw in that game was all that unique to begin with. The storyline isn't going to blow anyone away since there are better military science fiction universes. It is however competantly designed and written, and stylized in a unique way. They should be able to produce a passable movie.
I don't want Halo fans to get all upset at me here, because I'm trying to be objective rather than bashing it. I think most Halo fans could think of a sceince fiction novel or three that would make a better movie than Halo would (as Halo fans are also typically genere fans as well). I personally think David Drake, David Weber, and John Ringo have all produced better science fiction universes and space wars. The point is more along the lines that if someone judges a Halo movie by the standards of a blockbuster that should be topping all-time sales charts it's going to flop. On the other hand if you expect a mid-budget science fiction movie with a lot of stereotypical and predictable (but well done) action that will made a middling profit in the long term (from DVD releases and such, as opposed to just at the box office) Halo can doubtlessly deliver that without a problem.
Microsoft however tends to think big, I wouldn't be surprised that if in the back rooms the concern is more along the lines of them not wanting to invest the effort in a movie unless they can be reasonably certain it's going to be the next "Star Wars" or whatever. That's an unreasonable expectation especially within the science fiction genere in general. Nobody expected "Star Wars" to turn out like it did, especially when it was made.
I think "Wing Commander" is more an example of what happens when a company pretends to listen to it's consumers, and they decides it's going to do whatever the frak it wants to, and we better like it.
A current example of this would be Bioware and "Dragon Age", albiet it's not as long running a franchise as "Wing Commander" was. With plenty of time on the clock to push up the game and make radical changes if they wanted to, they decided to do some reveals about what they wanted to do with this "Hawke" character, basically the removal of most of the character creation options that made "Origins" a big hit with people wanting serious RPers. The response was as far as I saw, overwhelmingly negative, and this includes on their own forums which I checked out. There were of course some positive and very positive responses, and a lot of "I trust Bioware" responses, but by and large any serious responses were "this blows chips, we want multiple origins, racial selection, and more involved character creation". Indeed I was one of those pointing out that there is no reason to remove those aspects due to voice work since "Saint's Row 2" proved that they could have multiple voice actors read the script in differant ways so people could pick voices for differant races and backrounds and so on.
Bioware did not delay the game to modify things for more player choice, or in any way respond positively to the fan responses that it went out courting. Rather it blindly pushed on with what it was going to do. The problem with game companies is when they start determining what is signal and what is noise (so to speak) and overlook the obvious.
I see a lot of direct parallels with Wing Commander. It wasn't the Wing Commander movie that killed the series. It was when Origin started putting Mark Hamil into the role of the protaganist, removing the generic pilot (that you could name) and the whole "the hero is you" bit that a lot of people liked. This desician, and other ones cannonballed the series. If you believe the hype and a lot of reviews these games were going strong and you'd be justified to wonder "WTF happened, it must have been the movie", but if you were part of the fan base at the time, and on a lot of the forums and stuffm the players were actually fairly against what was going on, including changes to the gameplay to make it "more realistic" in the way ships handled and so on. Origin went right ahead to play with their celebrity actors and big movie productions, and the fans eventually decided "nope, not anymore. You know we made two previous games sell well that weren't what we wanted due to loyalty, take these last ones and stick them where the sun doesn't shine".
The Bloodrayne franchise was also suspected to have died due to bad movies, albiet in that case while blasted the Bloodrayne movie actually sold well enough to get a sequel (which is unusual for Uwe Boll). The death of that franchise, and lack of sales of it's sequel (which was clumsily released) seems to be connected to legal battles (which they lost) over similarities between Rayne and a 2100AD character called "Durham Red".
The point of all this rambling (which I am trying to reinforce with examples) is that I don't think a movie has ever killed a franchise. It's game developers and producers who kill franchises. After all if you have the installed fan base to warrent a movie, they aren't all going to turn just because of the movie, no more than characters like "Spider Man" and "Doctor Strange" disappeared due to horrendous movies made in the 1970s.
I'm not a big Halo fan, but if Microsoft is concerned about that killing the franchise I think they need to seriously consider their thought processes. But then again we still see the same things happening with games because game developers and producers always need some way of blaming the consumers rather than themselves for making bad desicians.
The most you can expect out of Halo, even with Speilburg, is a mediocre movie. Part of the whole point of Halo is that it's pretty typical military sci-fi as a video game. Nothing you saw in that game was all that unique to begin with. The storyline isn't going to blow anyone away since there are better military science fiction universes. It is however competantly designed and written, and stylized in a unique way. They should be able to produce a passable movie.
I don't want Halo fans to get all upset at me here, because I'm trying to be objective rather than bashing it. I think most Halo fans could think of a sceince fiction novel or three that would make a better movie than Halo would (as Halo fans are also typically genere fans as well). I personally think David Drake, David Weber, and John Ringo have all produced better science fiction universes and space wars. The point is more along the lines that if someone judges a Halo movie by the standards of a blockbuster that should be topping all-time sales charts it's going to flop. On the other hand if you expect a mid-budget science fiction movie with a lot of stereotypical and predictable (but well done) action that will made a middling profit in the long term (from DVD releases and such, as opposed to just at the box office) Halo can doubtlessly deliver that without a problem.
Microsoft however tends to think big, I wouldn't be surprised that if in the back rooms the concern is more along the lines of them not wanting to invest the effort in a movie unless they can be reasonably certain it's going to be the next "Star Wars" or whatever. That's an unreasonable expectation especially within the science fiction genere in general. Nobody expected "Star Wars" to turn out like it did, especially when it was made.
