Xbox’s’s piratical multiplayer game Sea of Thieves is being made into a live-action movie, Microsoft is toying with the idea of bringing the Halo TV series back – or at least doing something more in that area – and we’ve got the first plot details for the Gears of War film. There’s a plot? Stop it – don’t!
The news tumbles out of Entertainment Weekly and a big interview it conducted with Microsoft. Let’s tackle Sea of Thieves first. This is one of several film projects in development by Microsoft, EW reported. Apparently Marvel filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton – who has just finished directing Spider-Man: Brand New Day – is producing it through his company Hisako Films, though no director has been attached.
Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty said in the EW interview: “The main character of a Sea of Thieves game is actually the player and the community. So if you sit down to think about Sea of Thieves, it’s not who are the main characters? What’s the plot? It’s a super social game, but there’s a ton to Sea of Thieves. It’s built on a very cooperative community, so you can start to sense what that’s going to be like.”
No I can’t really sense what that’s going to be like, but I assume it’ll be a lighthearted buccanneering tale. Maybe something along the lines of Pirates of the Caribbean?
Onto the possibility of a Halo TV reappearance next, a show Paramount+ cancelled after two seasons, but which got a new lease of life after airing on Netflix relatively recently. “Halo, first and foremost, is one of our biggest franchises,” Booty said. “It’s iconic to Xbox and we’re certainly going to invest going forward.” I actually watched a couple of episodes of the Halo show and it was okay – there’s my dynamite hot-take. I didn’t see the sex scene.
Which leaves us with Gears of War. The film, directed by The Fall Guy director David Leitch, will apparently tell the origin story of Delta Squad. This is the crew Marcus Fenix leads in the Gears of War games, and we’ll see more of it in the upcoming Gears of War: E-Day game.
A description of the film plot reads: “The origin story of Delta Squad, a ragtag crew of soldiers who wage a desperate war for survival against the Locust, a race of subterranean creatures set on destroying humanity.” Not especially revealing, is it?
Suffice to say Microsoft has cinematic and multimedia ambitions for its brands beyond gaming. As Xbox boss Asha Sharma said in the EW interview: “You won’t see us try to become the biggest linear provider in the world or anything like that, but I think great games are culture, and culture is entertainment.
“If you think about it, we’ve got the number two show of all time on Amazon [Fallout], Minecraft was top five in 2025, Call of Duty is bigger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So it all measures. [There’s] more appetite to work with us on titles than ever before.”
Meanwhile, we’re bracing for Xbox to announce significant restructuring that could leave hundreds of people without jobs and see the closure of well-known and even beloved game studios. The futures of Psychonauts developer Double Fine, South of Midnight developer Compulsion, and Hellblade developer Ninja Theory are all reported to be on the line. And they may not be the only ones.
