sisslethecat
When it comes to video game narratives ripe for exploration on the silver screen, none are more clear cut than BioShock.
The 2007 video game is famous for its incredible story, art direction, and tone – all things that (in the grand scheme of game to film adaptions) would make it ripe for the picking. It has action, horror, mystery, and intrigue, not to mention one of the most iconic video game creature designs next to Pyramid Head and Minecraft Creepers in the Big Daddies. So it goes without saying that Hollywood did try to make a film happen, but it ultimately fell through. The director-to-be Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Carribean, The Ring) opened up about the canceled project in a Reddit AMA this week:
I wanted to keep it R-rated; I felt like that would be appropriate, and it’s an expensive movie, it’s a massive world we’re creating and it’s not a world we can simply go to locations to shoot. [For] A Cure For Wellness, we were able to really utilize a variety of location to create the world. Bioshock wouldn’t work like that; we’d be building an entire underworld universe.
So I think the combination of the price tag and the rating, [Universal Studios] just didn’t feel comfortable ultimately.
Verbinski has gone into detail about this conflict of interests before, saying that the price tag on an R rated movie was just too high at the time, and that R rated genre movies, in general, weren’t doing so hot financially. Not surprising, considering that the film was announced in 2008, the same year that saw the release of such amazing stinkers as The Happening, Punisher: Warzone, and total box office flops like Zach and Miri Make a Porno, and Doomsday. Verbinski did say that the climate has changed a bit now, with huge R-rated successes like Deadpool, although he might not be ready to step back into control:
Things have changed, [so] maybe there will be another chance.
It’s very difficult when you’re eight weeks away from shooting a movie you really can see in your head and you’ve almost filmed the entire thing, so emotionally you’re right at that transition from architect to becoming a contractor and that will be a difficult place to get back to.
Here’s hoping. BioShock is such a rich, interesting world to explore, and returning to it in a film would be amazing. Especially seeing how dedicated Verbinski (a director I generally respect… except on rare occasions) was to getting the project right, it could have been the first really great video game movie. We still have yet to really get that, despite some serious effort to bypass the stigma last year. There’s more to come, of course, apparently that Metal Gear Solid movie is still moving forward, a film based on Dead Space has been in talks forever, and Activision wants to create a Call of Duty cinematic universe… because if there’s one thing people really care about in CoD it’s the story. We’ll see what the future has in store for us, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed for a BioShock movie eventually happening.
[Source]
