This is Spartan

It's covered pretty widely elsewhere - maybe even a sidebar link on whatever news page you check, unlike the topics I tend to cover - but today's biggest sequel story is inarguably Halo 3. The game released Monday/Tuesday at midnight (I'd love to see national school attendance figures and compare Monday to Tuesday) at more than ten thousand retailers, including not only the usual GameStop-type suspects, but from Wal-Mart (which designated a special Halo-only checkout line) and Best Buy on down to 7-11 and White Hen.

Microsoft's press release is out: an estimated $170 million in sales, breaking the record for biggest day in US entertainment sales history, previously held by Halo 2. Granted, with a $60 price tag ($70 special edition, $129 super-special edition), it's got a sizeable jump on a $10 movie ticket, but still, pretty newsworthy in the realm of sequeldom.

Both Best Buy and GameStop project Halo 3 to wind up the top-selling game of all time.

For those of you not interested in video games, the Halo movie is still in the works. A deal was announced in 2005; Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh were on as executive producers, though they've since dropped out as the project developed. The original plan was to release it simultaneously with the Halo 3 game, which should give you an idea of its progress, since it's still in limbo after studio changes and rewrites (the original script, by Danny Boyle favorite Alex Garland, has been worked over by D.B. Weiss and A History of Violence adapter Josh Olson). Guillermo del Toro had been attached to direct at one point, but dropped out in favor of Hellboy 2 (more on that flick in some future post); currently director is still listed as Neill Blomkamp, but I expect that to change. Blomkamp was picked by Jackson, who's no longer involved to champion him, and a first-timer getting the reins for such a sizeable flick seems unlikely, especially with the budget being what it is. When Microsoft agreed to the initial deal, there was a stipulated budget minimum of $75 million to avoid any shenanigans, but part of what reportedly led Universal to bail out on the flick was the ballooning of the projected budget up into the $135 million range.

Feel free to assume that with Halo's payday on Tuesday and Microsoft's press release today, numerous studio execs will be taking Halo meetings before they head home for the weekend.