Former Marvel CEO and Marvel Studios founder Avi Arad has obtained the rights to the incredibly popular recent video game, Mass Effect.

Arad has been a producer on pretty much every Marvel movie released — including the Spider-Man movies and Iron Man — and will still continue to produce some of their movies as he embarks on this new venture. His new company, Avi Arad Productions, produced the non-Marvel flick Bratz: The Movie and now looks to try and bring Mass Effect to the big screen.

Many will think a Mass Effect movie would never work, as the game allows you to create your own male or female character, choose all sorts of different potentially plot-changing paths, and even allows you to choose what you say in every one of the hundreds of conversations you’ll have. The fact is, none of that really matters. Some things that happen by choice are massive points of the story, but the core storyline is always the same and this would enable film makers to put together the best story they can build and even have some extra stuff to work with while still being faithful. Not many have that kind of breathing room with an adaptation.

I’ve played the game (twice actually) fully expecting not to like it and I ended up loving it. I used to absolutely loathe RPG games (Yeah, I’m talking to you Final Fantasy. Taking turns attacking each other — Silly), but I guess technically this is an Action RPG game, which is different and much more enjoyable.

One thing I can guarantee is that if this is done right, it could easily be a hell of a lot better than the Halo movie they’ve been fighting to get made for so long now. I loved all three Halo games just as much as the next pale guy, but if you tied me up and tortured me, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what the hell that game’s actual storyline was. Because of this, they’ll be required to construct a more consumer-friendly story; while Mass Effect already has a strong story and can run with that out of the gate.

This is about as early as it can get in any project, so now we just wait and see who they’ll hire to write the script and who might direct it. When we know those things, we’ll know a lot more about how good or bad this movie could be.

[Source: /Film]