Legendary Pictures buys Mass Effect movie rights

Not that I don't agree with you, but somehow I expect they'll cast a male version of Shepard, in part because almost all (or maybe all) of the promotional material for the games featured a male Shepard, which seems to imply that's canon, even if they give you the option of a female lead instead.

As a fan of the games, and with the reassurance that Uwe Boll has his hands nowhere near it, I'm looking forward to it, but fully prepared to mourn its passing as yet another failed video game film.

I don't really understand the need for a Mass Effect movie, as the games are already very cinematic in scope.

Its called 'reinforcing the product'

I really hope they don't make the movie based off of the first Mass Effect game. Even going beyond the gender of the mc, there are many differen't branching storylines in it. I think they'd be better off making a movie set in the Mass Effect universe rather than basing it directly off of the games. For instance, showing the Geth uprising against the group that created them would be an awesome movie. Or the Protien's war with the Reapers.

Zoombie said:

Maybe we could start a petition? Like a, "Please have a Female Shepard in our film" one.

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I'm not convinced petitions do anything helpful, but I'm confident we'd have an eager legion of Mass Effect fans to support it. Maybe if we got the major gaming blogs/news aggregates talking about it, they would take a listen.

In any case, I see three major pitfalls they will have to dodge as far as story goes. These all assume they implement the film poorly, since all of these pitfalls can be avoided with really clever work (like all good writing/film).

1) If they follow the plot of ME1, they risk making a very watered down film (lots of subplots and secondary characters being cut) or one that is all over the place and incredibly complicated. In the case of the former, they will likely alienate fans. In the case of the latter, they lose the rest of the audience.

2) They could forego ME1 for a tie-in/lead-up to ME3 or whatever they might be working on, but in the process lose a lot of wiggle room in terms of story. Once again, the non-gaming audience will be lost as to what's going on, and the impact of whatever happens will likely mean little, since it's meant to tease for an upcoming game.

3) If they choose to go a different route than either of the two above, like a side-story or more background to the events of ME1&2, they risk having something that feels disjointed from the rest of the series. See Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within as an example of this.