Guillermo Del Toro, the erstwhile directorial candidate for the upcoming Halo film, would surely have met studio approval ... unlike newcomer Neil Blomkamp. Instead, Del Toro made Hellboy 2 a priority -- like he said -- and would reconsider Halo if they hadn't found anyone (hmmmm). Now, according to an interview with IGN, by way of Eurogamer (how about a link, guys?), Del Toro has signed onto consult on a Hellboy game, due out in 2007 by Konami. He's also consulting on another game by the developers of BloodRayne called Sundown; it's about zombies. Del Toro is the latest major filmmaker to look to games as a potent, new entertainment medium. Last year, Steven Spielberg and EA inked a deal to have the most famous filmmaker in the world "shape the concept, story and visual appearance" of three new games. And just last month, at Microsoft's X06 event in Barcelona, Peter Jackson announced he'd be creating two projects for the Xbox 360 with full writing credit going to him and his partner, Fran Walsh.
It's great to see three directors, all similarly adept at switching from the blockbuster model -- War of the Worlds, Hellboy, Lord of the Rings -- to the smaller stories -- Catch Me if You Can, The Devil's Backbone, Heavenly Creatures -- pursuing video games as another medium to tell stories with. Says a forward thinking Del Toro, "I do believe that the future of storytelling lies within an interactive platform and more likely or not it will come out of a marriage of movies, videogames, and TV, so I'm trying to learn all those mediums."
