‘BioShock’: Guillermo del Toro Recalls “Disastrous” Movie Talks… “F*ck No”
By Dread Central
3 min readGuillermo del Toro tried to get involved with a BioShock movie, but a couple of phone calls apparently put him […]
Guillermo del Toro tried to get involved with a BioShock movie, but a couple of phone calls apparently put him […]
For anyone unfamiliar, the original 2007 game follows a plane-crash survivor who discovers Rapture, a decaying underwater city conceived as a utopia. Instead, he finds genetically altered inhabitants, brutal violence, and the hulking Big Daddies who protect the mysterious Little Sisters.
And then there’s the sheer expense of putting that world on screen.
Rapture’s look is best described as Art Deco retrofuturism, with grand architecture, elaborate interiors, and strange technology deteriorating beneath the ocean. Making all of that feel convincing, futuristic, and frightening without becoming cheesy is a massive undertaking. You need the scale of an underwater city while keeping its individual rooms and corridors believable.
That cost has been a problem for this adaptation for a very long time.
Universal announced a BioShock movie back in 2008, with Gore Verbinski (The Ring, Pirates of the Caribbean) directing and John Logan writing. Budget concerns stalled that version, with Verbinski moving into a producing role and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later) coming aboard to direct.
Neither version made it to production. In a 2012 interview with Ain’t It Cool News, Fresnadillo pointed to the difficulty of securing a large budget for material that he felt needed an R rating.
Verbinski expressed the same frustration to ComingSoon: “We just didn’t have any takers on an R-rated movie with that pricetag.”
Netflix announced its own adaptation in 2022, later revealing that Francis Lawrence (Constantine, I Am Legend) would direct, with Michael Green (Logan, Blade Runner 2049) writing the screenplay.
As we previously reported, producer Roy Lee told Collider earlier this year that the project was waiting for Lawrence to finish his work on The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping before returning to BioShock.
There’s still no announced release date. Between finding a cinematic approach to its interactive story and paying to bring Rapture to life, it’s easy to understand why this one has taken so long.