The Battle for Bioshock: Rapture’s Haunting Tales May go Untold on the Big Screen
For the past few years, the on-again-off-again possibility for a BioShock film has been knocking on Hollywood’s door. Gamers that have played the series have felt strongly towards making an adapted feature film out of the art deco piece, which integrates futuristic elements into a frozen in time world beneath the sea. How enchanting it would be to see those Big Daddies and Little Sisters come to life, and buzz about who would play who has plagued the rumor sites on the internet surrounding the potential in the film’s creation.
The interest was first sparked by Gore Verbinski of The Pirates of the Caribbean fame, but diminished when an R rating was denied, and the cost to develop and create those iconic steam punk costumes would increase the budget.
“I couldn’t really get past anybody that would spend the money that it would take to do it and keep an R rating,” [Verbinski] said. “Alternately, I wasn’t really interested in pursuing a PG-13 version. Because the R rating is inherent. Little Sisters and injections and the whole thing.
“I just wanted to really, really make it a movie where, four days later, you’re still shivering and going, ‘Jesus Christ!’… It’s a movie that has to be really, really scary,” he added, “but you also have to create a whole underwater world, so the pricetag is high. We just didn’t have any takers on an R-rated movie with that pricetag.”
Today it was reported on The Playlist that the second potential director, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, hinted at the fact that an issue between 2K Games and the studio in a disagreement over budget and rating is preventing his vision from coming to light.
Fans of the series can appreciate the reasons why the directors have been stepping out, accuracy in the story is a detrimental part to the integrity of the game, and since BioShock’s creator, Kevin Levine is still interested in a feature adaptation, hopefully we might see BioShock as a blockbuster event coming to theaters in the near future.
