Halo Movie: Guillermo Del Toro Apparently Wanted Master Chief To Have An Evil Twin Brother

Efforts have been underway for a very long time to make a Halo movie, with the likes of Neill Blomkamp, Peter Jackson, and Guillermo del Toro all attached to the project during various stages of production on a film that would never come out. Some new details about del Toro's version has now come to light, and it sounds pretty wild.

Paul Russell, who came up Halo's title and was an artist at Bungie for years, shared a new detail from del Toro's movie script with IGN. He said del Toro had an idea to give Master Chief a twin brother who was evil.

"Master Chief had a twin brother, and the twin brother sided with The Flood, and then the end of the movie was going to be brother against brother," Russell said.

Russell said he heard this from veteran Halo writer Joseph Staten. "Del Toro was pitching this to Joe at his house," Russell said. "He was punching Joe on the arm and going, 'And they're brothers! And they're going to fight at the end!'"

Del Toro was working on this Halo movie script with D.B. Weiss, who went on to head up HBO's Game of Thrones. Del Toro ultimately stopped working on Halo to produce Hellboy 2 instead.

Giving Master Chief an evil twin brother is a pretty extreme idea, and it surely would have elicited some strong reactions from Halo fans. Microsoft is known to be protective of the Halo canon.

Blomkamp, who was also attached to direct a Halo movie at one point in time, said one of the issues he had was that he wasn't given creative control.

"If I was given control, I would really like to do that film," Blomkamp said. "But that's the problem. When something pre-exists, there's this idea of my own interpretation versus 150 other people involved with the film's interpretation of the same intellectual property."

Blomkamp and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson were prepared to begin shooting the Halo movie, and when it fell apart, they made District 9 instead--it was a big hit.