Rumor: DreamWorks attempting to resurrect Halo movie, using novels as source material

20th Century Fox uses Red Tape! Critical hit! Halo movie has fainted.

DreamWorks uses Loophole. It's super effective!

After the seemingly too-good-to-be-true hire of Peter Jackson to produce a Halo movie turned out to be, well, just that, the film hit snag-after-snag and was finally put on hold last year. Now, though, with Reach climbing to the top of the charts and then swan diving into pools of money, movie studios are predictably interested in bringing Halo to the silver screen once again.

But how? After all, Universal and Fox went at each other like two 12-year-olds on Xbox Live over the Halo movie's previous incarnation. Take one wrong step, then, and you're smack dab in the middle of a legal minefield. The solution? Halo novels. Books like Halo: The Fall of Reach handily sidestep the issue of drawing from the same source material as Universal and Fox, making lawsuits less likely. And so, according to a report from Vulture, that's exactly what Steven Spielberg-founded DreamWorks Pictures is doing.

Granted, the project doesn't even have a writer yet, so even if something does come of it, it's still a long way out. Also, there's this particularly damning analysis from one of Vulture's anonymous sources:

“It’s a gigantic waste of time, because [Microsoft] doesn’t want anything to happen in any other media that could screw up a multi-billion dollar franchise. Somebody has to be in control of a movie; it’s a director’s medium. But they’re completely averse to that. Because if Steven Spielberg f**ks it up, what’s your recourse? So the rule is: ‘First, do no harm.’”

Ok, seriously, it's getting really hard to keep blind hope alive with all this silly evidence getting in the way. The movie's release may be a matter of when - not if - but you may as well get comfy, because we don't imagine Microsoft and co. will be saying "when" for quite some time.