Gore Verbinski knows why his BioShock movie was canceled after a couple of years in troubled development, and regrets the time spent going back and forth on it. The project, based on the first BioShock game, was announced in 2009, and spent two to three years in tumultuous development before ultimately being dropped. At one point, former fresh-faced roommates Eddie Redmayne and Jamie Dornan were competing for the lead role. Unfortunately, those days are long gone, and Verbinski's vision with it.
The original BioShock was a universally loved masterpiece, reinventing the first-person shooter with a unique blend of atmospheric survival horror and deeply impactful narrative. The game itself was an ambitious gamble, but it paid off, and the movie was fast-tracked to coincide with the eventual release of what would become BioShock: Infinite. Verbinski was attached to direct after his extraordinary success with The Pirates of the Caribbean, though he dropped out of directing to instead exclusively produce in August of 2009. As per a script leaked to a birth.movies.death. writer last year, the movie would have been pretty faithful to the game, with an emphasis on the brutality of the narrative. Ultimately, that seems to have been its downfall.
In a recent interview with Collider, Verbinski shared his thoughts on what happened to kill the BioShock movie. According to him, it was the ambition of a project so expensive and yet so brutal.
"It was talked about as one movie. And it was strange, my first meeting at Universal on 'Bioshock' was sitting in a room and saying, 'Hey guys, this is a $200 million R rated movie.' And it was silent. I remember my agent going, 'Why did you say that?' I'm like, because it is. Why just even trying to kill a movie you haven't even started? That's before getting a scripted before anything. I'm just I just want to be clear. And I think everybody at the studio was well, yeah, okay, maybe. Wow, no. It's big, we know."
Verbinksi goes on to describe the process that followed, which was an exhausting back and forth of debating the risk of making an R-rated video game movie for so much money. In the early 2010s, there was no Deadpool yet, and there were no successful video game movies. Even the MCU was a pupa of the absolute monster it is now. Verbinksi mentions Zack Snyder's Watchmen, which was effectively the industry litmus test at the time for big-budget R-rated "nerd culture" movies. It had barely broken even, likely actually losing money after marketing and distribution, so the likelihood of a studio taking another massive risk on an even less stable genre was never likely.
However, that was a different time. BioShock has remained an iconic property, with a new game coming at some point in the relatively near future. It's also a better time for potentially risky R-rated movies, thanks to the industry ceilings broken by superhero and video game movies in the last ten years or so. Verbinski has said before that he'd be willing to take another crack at it, so maybe there's room in the cultural lexicon for a BioShock movie to come out just in time for the new game.
Source: Collider