Speaking to the LA Times’ HeroComplex, director Neill Blomkamp said that it was a stroke of “luck” that the Halo film, which Peter Jackson was to produce, never happened since it would have meant that he wouldn’t be able to make District 9 – which went on to become a big success, despite being made on a $30 million budget.
“The luck is the fact that Peter and [his partner] Fran [Walsh] let me make [‘District 9’] out of the ruins that were ‘Halo,’. What happened out of that was learning to trust my ideas. If ‘Halo’ had come out and succeeded or failed, I wouldn’t have learned that.
“It’s getting to the point now where [Blomkamp’s agency] WME just doesn’t send me stuff anymore. It’s not because I think I’m better than any of that stuff. There are many franchises out there I would love to participate in. The problem is when you agree to do that, you take a lot of the control that you have over your own creative destiny away from yourself.”
So don’t hedge bets that Blomkamp will ever try his hand at directing a Halo film. Microsoft itself seems to have given up on the idea with a TV series for the same produced by Stephen Spielberg already announced. Meanwhile, Blomkamp is awating