Should Halo get a second season at Paramount+, it will be under a new showrunner — the third for the series adaptation of the mega-selling video game franchise.
After eight years and a platform switch from Showtime to Paramount+, Halo is set to premiere March 24. The ViacomCBS streaming service has yet to make a decision on a renewal. As such no deals are in place yet for a season two showrunner, but executive producer Justin Falvey told reporters Tuesday that should it go forward, Fear the Walking Dead and Brave New World veteran David Wiener could take the reins.
He’ll take over for Steven Kane, who oversaw physical production on the first season in Budapest, and Kyle Killen, who supervised writing and production in the United States. Both have since departed the show, with Kane saying he would stay on as a consultant for a potential second season.
Related Stories
“I never thought it would be more than a one season thing because of the amount of work it takes,” Kane said during Paramount+’s time before the Television Critics Association. He was in Budapest for a total of two years, he said, and chose to step away so as not to be away from his family for that long again.
A Halo series has been in the works for eight years, and has also gone through two directors (Otto Bathurst replaced Rupert Wyatt after schedule conflicts forced Wyatt to drop out) in addition to moving from Showtime — where it initially earned a series order in 2018 — to Paramount+.
“We went through a number of fits and starts,” executive producer Kiki Wolfkill of game publisher 343 Studios said. “A lot of it was getting the right team together. Showtime was an amazing partner and still is — they’re our studio. But it was a challenge to bring this to life in an authentic way. We tried some different things and failed fast and moved to the next thing.”
Falvey and Darryl Frank, co-presidents of Amblin Television, both noted that their team — including Steven Spielberg, who was set to executive produce an iteration of the series when it was at Xbox Entertainment Studios — and that of 343 Studios stayed with Halo throughout its long development, which Falvey noted isn’t always the case with long-gestating projects.
Spielberg kept a hand in as well, said Frank: “We always treated it as a legacy project of Steven’s. He read every script and was involved in looking at every aspect of the production. He asked us to look at it as if it was one of his properties.”
As for the big-budget show’s future, Paramount+ hasn’t made any decision yet, but Falvey said he thinks Halo can run for several seasons.
“Talk about world building — it’s literally the whole universe, so we have a lot of buckets we can explore,” said Falvey. “Hopefully we’ll be doing this for some time.”
