Director J.J. Abrams has confirmed that the planned Portal and Half-Life movies are still in the works – but it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing them any time soon. They’ll still probably get here before Half-Life 3, though.
The two videogame movies were first announced back in 2013 by Abrams and Valve boss Gabe Newell. Obviously three years later, people are starting to wonder if it was all a crazy dream.
Recently, while Abrams was busy promoting 10 Cloverfield Lane, IGN asked the director if he had an update on either the Half-Life or Portal flicks.
Abrams responded:
Not yet, but they’re in development. And we’ve got writers, and we’re working on both those stories. But nothing that would be an exciting update.
The big take away here is that the films are definitely still happening – that’s something. You can’t really blame Abrams for taking so long either, since he’s been pretty busy in a galaxy far, far away for the past couple of years.
Interestingly, 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg made a pretty great short film about Portal called Portal: No Escape. Perhaps he and Mr Abrams could sit down and have a profitable discussion.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.