Those holding out hope that a film based on the acclaimed and popular “Bioshock” video game series would see the light of day – sorry, but it is pretty much dead.
Universal put the project on indefinite hold back in 2011. At the time Gore Verbinski was to direct, and the halt was due to budgetary issues.
Now, Irrational Games’ creative director Ken Levine revealed that he is the man who personally pulled the plug on the project. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, he goes into detail as to what happened:
“There was a deal in place, and it was in production at Universal – Gore Verbinski was directing it. My theory is that Gore wanted to make a hard R film – which is like a 17/18 plus, where you can have blood and naked girls. Well, I don’t think he wanted naked girls. But he wanted a lot of blood.
Then Watchmen came out, and it didn’t do well for whatever reason. The studio then got cold feet about making an R rated $ 200 million film, and they said what if it was a $ 80 million film – and Gore didn’t want to make a $ 80 million film.
They brought another director in, and I didn’t really see the match there – and 2K’s one of these companies that puts a lot of creative trust in people. So they said if you want to kill it, kill it. And I killed it.
It was weird, as having been a screenwriter, begging to do anything, and then killing a movie on something you’d worked on so much. It was saying I don’t need to compromise – how many times in life do you not need to compromise? It comes along so rarely, but I had the world, the world existed and I didn’t want to see it done in a way that I didn’t think was right. It may happen one day, who knows, but it’d have to be the right combination of people.”