First full-length 'Halo' trailer confirms the show is definitely 'Halo'

Nearly 9 years after Hollywood first announced its plans, fans were finally treated to a real, honest-to-God trailer last night for the upcoming live-action adaptation of the iconic first-person-shooter video game series, Halo. Premiering on the Paramount+ streaming service sometime in 2022, Halo will center on... well, Halo.

If you are in any way, shape, or form familiar with video games, then you are aware of Halo. The original sci-fi space opera shoot ‘em up concerns a genetically modified super-soldier fighting to stop an alien race of religious zealots from waging a galactic holy war to usher in the apocalypse. It first came out for the original Xbox exactly two months and three days after September 11, 2001. Timing is everything, they say. The plotline veers from there, but we’d be willing to bet the showrunners are sticking to a tried-and-true formula. Check out the one-minute trailer below.

Halo, starring Pablo Schreiber, Bokeem Woodbine, and Cortana herself, Jen Taylor, is set to hit TV next year. Meanwhile, Halo Infinite is available now for Xbox consoles and PC, and is very good.

Not much known other than it’s a Halo — It’s still unclear if Paramount’s Halo show will focus on the plotline of the original trilogy, or if it will hone in on other, perhaps lesser problematic sections of lore within the series’ past two decades (believe us, there is a lot of lore to choose from). The trailer doesn’t reveal much, but it does give off big “Mommy Issues” vibes thanks to a narration from Natascha McElhone’s Dr. Catherine Halsey, so maybe this will be less a sci-fi action epic, and more a quiet, introspective character analysis probing masculine issues of violence and repressed emotions...

Just kidding. We’re sure it won’t be long before we get some additional footage of Master Chief blasting his way through hordes of purple-blooded aliens using a creative array of both futuristic firepower and melee weaponry. And you know what? We’re sure it’ll look really cool and be really fun, so long as we don’t think too hard about it.

Is there space (get it?) for Halo? — It might be hard to remember, but there was a time when a Halo film or television series would have been pretty wild to see get made. But that time was roughly 5 to 10 years ago. As the streaming revolution becomes the streaming norm and big-budget adaptations debut all over the “small” screen, a heavy-budget sci-fi epic based in a beloved, escapist universe focusing on a near constantly helmeted soldier sounds a bit, um, well-worn. And say what you will about Halo, it doesn’t have itself a Grogu (yet).

Still, Halo fans are a-plenty out there, so it still could easily become next year’s “Big Thing.” We’ve waited nearly a decade to find out, what’s another few months?