Rumor: Dreamworks Halo movie mentioned in press release [update 2]

So this is ... weird.

Halo.fr received a press release for the French version of the novel Halo: Cryptum, and it mentions a forthcoming Halo movie in development with Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks.

Now, we've gotten better than a greedy mortician at ignoring signs of life from the oft-revived and killed-off Halo movie, and would have been more than happy to dismiss this as a misinformed publicist or hopeful copy editor. But it's a little harder in this case. The blurb mirrors a report from Vuture that Dreamworks was considering adapting the books, avoiding some of the legal cruft gathered around the video game-to-movie adaptation. Ready for the weird part? We ran the story on the Vulture piece exactly one year ago today.

Spooky, right? We suspect the interference of ghosts, but we've contacted the novel's US publisher and Microsoft in the hopes of finding our for sure.

[Update: We heard back from Tor, which publishes Halo books stateside. It doesn't work with French publisher Milady directly, but was unaware of any movie version of Halo in the works. That's not a denial per se, but if it was happening, you can bet Tor would have heard about it.

Update 2: And now, a post from 343 Industries' Frank O'Connor on NeoGAF, which reads "This is ow you say? Ah yes. Ze nonsense." Yeah, we're calling it: Time of death: 12:05 p.m. EST]