Get ready to meet Halo’s iconic hero all over again.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Xbox today, Paramount+ has released the first trailer for Halo: The Series, its live-action adaptation of the beloved first-person shooter series. Starring Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, the brief trailer sees the hero don his iconic Mjolnir power armour, before being re-introduced to his A.I. partner, Cortana (voiced by Jen Taylor, reprising her role from the video games).
Originally planned to air on Showtime before being transitioned to Paramount+, the series will follow Schreiber’s Master Chief in a re-imagined telling of the conflict between Earth’s United Nations Space Command and the religious alien faction known as the Covenant seen in the first three Halo games and the prequel Halo: Reach. Rather than a direct adaptation of the games, the series will integrate new and familiar characters, including Bentley Kalu, Natasha Culzac, and Kate Kennedy as three new fellow members of Master Chief’s Spartan supersoldier program, Vannak-134, Riz-028, and Kai-125 respectively.
Alongside Taylor and Schrieber as Cortana and Chief, familiar faces include Natascha McElhone as Doctor Catherine Halsey, the creator of Cortana and the scientist behind the extremely-ethically-questionable program that created the Spartans. From the Halo novel universe, there’ll be Shabana Azmi as Admiral Margaret Parangosky, the head of ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence — the UNSC’s intelligence agency that helped Halsey recruit and train candidates for the Spartan program — and Bokeem Woodbine as another Spartan, Soren-066, one of the program’s earliest candidates who, in the novels, left the program after his genetic enhancements went wrong, and eventually joined up with human insurrectionists fighting for colonial independence.
Halo is set to stream on Paramount+ some time in 2022.