Plenty of videogame players certainly would have loved to see the unique world of BIOSHOCK come to life at the local theater. And for a time, it was actually happening.
But director (and then producer) Gore Verbinski ultimately faced the same dilemma as Guillermo del Toro’s AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS — he couldn’t get the people with deep pockets to pay for a mega-budget R-rated movie. And so it went, sunk to the ocean floor.
Still, in a recent interview, the game’s creative director Ken Levine does give some small hope of it becoming reality: “I think we’re in the space now of building properties that are appealing to people, and there’s a version of BioShock that makes a great game and there’s probably a version of BioShock that makes a great movie. I think for us as a company, we don’t have any need to get a movie made. We’d like to have a movie made, but it would have to be the right one, and we’ve had the opportunity to get it made and unless all the right pieces are in place – it’s hard enough to get a movie made when all the right pieces are in place. If you don’t start with the right pieces, you don’t have a prayer.
We’ve had a lot of great talks with great people about it. We got close to great people, but you always have to have all of those pieces in place and that’s going to be very challenging. It’s a moving puzzle, but I’m going to be continually talking to people about it. It’s definitely something that’s still in the conversation.”
Not the most promising comments, but big-screen Big Daddies and Splicers are still conceivable. Meanwhile, Levine is finishing up their latest ambitious game project, BIOSHOCK INFINITE.
Set in the 1960s, the first BIOSHOCK game follows a man whose plane crashes near the underwater city called Rapture. Built by a businessman as a sanctuary for brilliant scientists and artists to freely practice their crafts, Rapture fell into chaos as the inhabitants slowly became obsessed with genetic modification and dark arts.
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