Mass Effect has a bit of a history with the big (and small) screen, with Legendary Pictures having bought movie rights to the space opera RPG series way back in 2010. The hypothetical movie that should have been the fruit of that deal has languished in pre-development hell ever since, even though tentative rumblings about it have been heard from time to time. – Me We can’t take complete credit though - this is something that Mass Effect spin-off media has figured out at the very beginning. The game series is supported by spin-off titles, books and even an anime movie called Paragon Lost. All of these additional pieces of media have one thing in common, and that is a distinct lack of Commander Shepard - sure, the protagonist of the trilogy gets namedropped, and one time we sort of see their unrecognizable corpse (spoiler?) but the whole point is that no media encroaches upon our Shepard. The protagonist of Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 is highly customizable, with their gender, appearance and decisions made during the story - thus their personality - up to the player. Everyone’s Shepards - because come on, we’ve all played through these games many times - are intimate and personal. Some of the best, most memorable moments of the Mass Effect trilogy are the quiet ones in between the characters we’ve come to know and love, and our character that we shaped. Ultimately, playing Commander Shepard in an adaptation is an impossible task - usually when dealing with adaptations, it’s a foregone conclusion that you can’t make everyone happy, but even attempting to squeeze Shepard and their branching, variable, customizable RPG epic into a rigid, linear motion picture format is a surefire way to make nobody happy.
