Legendary Pictures, the company behind Christopher Nolans Batman movies, Watchmen and 300, has picked up the rights to the videogame Mass Effect, with an eye to turning it into a big budget feature. They seem to want to move forward fairly quickly, as THR reports they’re already talking to Thor and I Am Legend scribe Mark Protosevich about writing the screenplay.
While video game to movie conversions generally haven’t worked out that well, Mass Effect seems a perfect fit in this post-Avatar world, with the game focussing on a soldier and his starship, the SSV Normandy. Gameplay spans across the galaxy, and while Mass Effect is known for it’s complex side-stories and alternate pathways (decisions you make during the game effect the eventual outcome), if the film follows the main plot of the first game, it’ll see Commander Shepard and his recon squad on a quest to try to prevent the machines of a long-extinct alien species from engaging in their once every 50,000 raid of the galaxy, causing mass extinctions amongst the many human and alien civilsations.
It’s a game that has the potential to be a truly great, sprawling soap opera, spanning the galaxy and taking in numerous alien worlds. Legendary would seem to be a company that could make this happen. However we’ve been burned so many times with videogame to movie adapatations, don’t get too excited just yet.