Earlier today at this year’s D.I.C.E Summit, Star Trek and Star Wars Episode VII director J.J. Abrams revealed that plans for both a Portal and Half-Life film are in the early stages of development and that he’s personally invested in bringing these Valve series to the silver screen.
“It’s as real as anything in Hollywood ever gets,” Abrams told Polygon. “Which is that we are really talking to Valve, we are going to be bringing on a writer, we have a lot of very interesting ideas.”
Not only does he want to see these movies happen, but he wants to treat both universes with the same respect as other written works adapted to film.
“And both a Portal and Half-Life movie are things I want to see,” Abrams said. “We’re also aware of the cautionary tales of movies that became games and vice versa. Our goal here to is to treat the world Valve has created in both these properties like anyone would a book or some great story that comes from a pitch or original script — just to treat it with the respect they treat their games and their players with.”
The filmmaker claimed that all of this came about when he met and had conversations with Valve — specifically Managing Director Gabe Newell — about collaborating to create a new game. Abram’s said he wanted it to explore “the limits of gaming in a perfect way.”
“We’ve had so many meetings and finally got to a point where we said, ‘We need to start making stuff,'” he stated. “And so the ideas that we’ve had for games, the ideas they’ve had for turning Portal and Half-Life into a film, we just decided we actually have to start doing this stuff.”
Would you like to see a Half-Life and Portal movie? What would you expect from a J.J. Abrams game complete with the backing of Valve? Let us know in the comments below!
[Polygon]
