Why was the Bioshock movie given the axe?

March 12th 2013, 10:14pm

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

I have friends who are crazy about Bioshock. My same friend who pestered me about BREAKING BAD, was the same who earlier kept trying to push his copy of Bioshock on me, “This game is great. It’s within this universe that’s crazy, but kind of beautiful at the same time. When I started playing, I couldn’t put it down.” I caved on that, but never ended up finishing it because of some series or other game or something of the like. I think Fallout 3 eventually sort of filled the void. I’d like to go back and revisit it though.

At one point, fans were excited to hear that a movie adaptation of the game was coming via Gore Verbinski. Then, everything sort of fell apart. It was a sad day. Bioshock creator, Ken Levine recently spoke with Eurogamer about the falling out and why the adaptation may not ever happen:

My theory is that Gore wanted to make a hard R film. 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 an $80 million film – and Gore didn’t want to make an $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.

The film moved on to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo as a director after Verbinski, but its fate was already sealed at that point. Levine was no stranger to what happens in Hollywood, and knew the balance between being involved with games and cinema. With anything that is created then becomes successful, the person who created it feels a huge amount of pride and protection over their work. Levine thought that if it wasn’t going to happen the right way, then it didn’t need to happen at all. At least not at this time:

“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.

Check out the full interview with Levine below.