According to rumors first posted on IESB, Steven Spielberg was so impressed with writer Stuart Beattie's Halo: The Fall of Reach script that he's thrown his hat into the ring to produce the movie.

As Beattie, a Halo fan, told GameDaily last year, The Fall of Reach begins before the events of the first Halo game as a small boy named John sees his world unravel after the Halo is discovered and the Convenant arrive. Beattie is best known as the screenwriter for Pirates of the Caribbean, G.I. Joe and the upcoming Gears of War movie.

Given the upcoming release of Halo: ODST and the movie that was almost Halo, District 9, the Halo movie license has never been hotter.

The report also lists Beattie and Spielberg as clients of CAA (Creative Artists Agency), one of Hollywood's premiere talent agencies and says that internal talks were already taking place. Spielberg's been long established as a game after creating the Medal of Honor series with his Dreamworks Interactive studio (later sold to Electronic Arts), two Boom Blox games and recently talked on stage at E3 during Microsoft's unveiling of Project Natal.

Given his successes as a producer on both Transformers movie but bruised by Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull and War of the Worlds, gamers may view the rumor with an understandable level of ambivalence.

Sources: Joystiq