"Mass Effect" has started its journey to the big screen. Numerous sources have confirmed that producer Avi Arad has optioned the rights to Bioware's sci-fi RPG from the developer's parent publisher Electronic Arts.
Turning "Mass Effect" into a movie, or at least trying to do so, is pretty much a no-brainer. Even those who didn't love it would have to admit that it has a lot more meat to its narrative than most games. You've got a hard-ass protagonist, a crusty bureaucracy trying to hold him back, a motley supporting cast, a hugely diverse (if a bit similar looking) bunch of settings, and an alien invasion fueled by technology that nobody but our hero fully understands.
Those are certainly a lot of standard elements for a science-fiction movie. Though "Mass Effect, rather intriguingly, has a main character whose look and personality and even gender can, to some extent, be shaped by the player. So the makers of a movie will have to figure out just who exactly Commander Shephard is.
Arad was for a long time the head of Marvel's movie business, where he helped start the new wave of actually good comic book movie franchises like "X-Men," "Spider-Man," and "Iron Man" (OK, there was "Spider-Man 3" and "Elektra" and "Ghost Rider," but there's still no denying Marvel movies are much improved). Now he runs his own production company and has been getting into videogame adaptations, starting recently with "Lost Planet."
Both EA and Arad declined to comment, but it's a good bet that Avi is right now trying to put together the elements to get a movie going, including a writer, director, and most importantly, setting it up at a studio. When and if that happens, we'll have a lot more insight into just what kind of a movie "Mass Effect" might be.
As for EA, this fits well into its strategy of turning its fully-owned games into multi-media properties (witness the "Dead Space" direct-to-DVD movie, comic books, etc.) Not that there was really any doubt when it spent $860 million to buy Bioware and Pandemic, but I'd say a movie deal is even more evidence that "Mass Effect 2" is in on the way from EA.
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