Del Toro considers Halo film

Guillermo del Toro has confirmed that he's in talks with various parties including executive producer Peter Jackson about directing the Halo film, but that he'd ideally like to do a Hellboy sequel first.

"The ideal for me would be to do Hellboy 2 and if Halo doesn't go away, then yeah, I'd love to do both," he told British film magazine Empire. "But it may go to somebody else. We'll see."

Del Toro, said to be a bit of a gamer himself, also paid tribute to the completeness of the Halo universe. "Most of the time games don't have a universe or creatures that interest me enough and this one does," he said. "Master Chief is such an iconic character and it's very much a sort of a good version of [Hellboy villain] Kroenen."

Microsoft's really gunning for the Halo film to be one of the biggest videogame film adaptations of all time, paying Alex Garland $1 million to pen a script, arranging a deal between Universal Pictures and Fox to screen it in 2007, and recently announcing that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh would act as executive producers while Weta Studios handled special effects.

In a recent interview with Dark Horizons, Jackson revealed that he was relatively close to directing it himself, but that fatigue from back to back Lord of the Rings and King Kong films had dissuaded him. "I want a break. I want to have the fun but not the hard work," he said. "I just want to be part of the creative team but not actually have the pain."