Legendary Pictures announced this week that it intends to bring the video game franchise Mass Effect to the big screen with distribution by Warner Bros. Producers of the film are in discussions with Mark Protosevich about writing the script for the adaptation. Protosevich’s writing credits include ‘I Am Legend’ as well as the yet to be released ‘Thor’.
Mass Effect is an original property developed at Bioware, the first game was released prior to them being acquired by Electronic Arts in November 2007 and the second game was released in January 2010. The franchise takes place in an immersive science fiction setting with an emphasis on cinematic story telling and action sequences. Bioware has displayed an eye for detail in regards to the game play as well as delivering a rich underlying mythology which makes it perfectly suitable for a feature film adaptation.
The video games have been quite innovative in that Bioware developed a system where future instalments would utilise saved game data from previous games and take into account player made decisions which impact the story.
Things are still early in pre-production and there have been no announcements of casting however both video games have an impressive cast including Martin Sheen, Seth Green, Yvonne Strahovski, Tricia Helfer, Adam Baldwin, Keith David, Lance Henriksen, Seth Green, and Carrie-Anne Moss.
We’ll bring you more news on this as it develops, though being so early in pre-production don’t expect to see a theatrical release anytime soon.
