Creativity Online interviews film director Neill Blomkamp about the promotional shorts he did for Halo 3, and in the process, finds out that the Halo movie project is a lot more dead than most fans think, and that the shorts were entirely separate, and not part of an attempt to lure Hollywood back into the project:

There's such a massive misconception about what those are. In essence, those pieces have zero to do with the film. Like less than zero. I worked on the film for a few months and we developed a lot of things during that time, and none of that has anything to do with the shorts. Long, long long after the film died, Bungie and Microsoft asked me if I wanted to be involved in the Halo 3 promotional stuff, just because I knew all of the guys at Bungie, and I was like Yeah, sure, that sounds like fun. I went about starting to make those three pieces back with a lot of the guys from Weta who had made the original film. All of the design and everything that we'd made for the film is just locked up in some locker somewhere, so all of the stuff for the shorts is specifically for the short films, from scratch.

Thanks for the heads-up on this story to Louis Wu at HBO.