Mass Effect Movie was Canceled, but a TV Show Would be Swell

Way back in 2010, Legendary Pictures got the rights to make a Mass Effect movie, the news of which was met with a mix of excitement and trepidation, as this was before hollywood really figured out video game movies and we were still operating under the assumption that Disney’s mediocre The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was the best we could ever hope for.

However, in the decade plus that has since passed, we’ve heard next to nothing about this project, if we even remembered it was a thing at all. Most of us probably assumed that the whole endeavor had been canceled, and in an interview with Business Insider, Mac Walters, project director of Mass Effect Legendary Edition, confirmed that’s exactly the case.
 

“It felt like we were always fighting the IP… What story are we going to tell in 90 to 120 minutes? Are we going to do it justice?”

So apparently, it was just too much to fit into a single movie — which checks. Trying to cram this stuff never turns out well: just look at The Last Airbender movie to see how that worked. Fortunately, however, Mac Walters thinks that where movies might fail the franchise, it would be perfect for TV.
 

“When we build out a ‘Mass Effect’ game, we have a backbone, or an overall story that we want to tell, but each level or mission is like its own TV episode. It doesn’t get written ahead of time. It gets written at the time that we get to it. So it gets added to the main story and sometimes the main story gets adjusted because we did something really cool in that ‘episode.’ So long-from storytelling is a great place for game franchises.”

He’s also very optimistic about the fact that one day, a Mass Effect show will be made — it calls it a matter of “when” rather than “if”. If that’s a good or a bad thing, though, well… we’ll have to see.

Better not star maleshep. Dude’s too boring to carry a TV series.