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Director Gore Verbinski took to Reddit yesterday for an Ask Me Anything session meant to promote his new movie, A Cure for Wellness. But one of his most in-depth answers was to whether the BioShock movie would ever get made.
Verbinski said his team was eight weeks into working on the film, which is based on Irrational Games’ dystopian first person shooter of the same name, when the studio pulled the plug on the project. Verbinski said the studio wanted to give the film a more accessible rating (like a PG-13), and he didn’t want to make the movie if it wasn’t going to be rated R.
“It's an R-rated movie,” Verbinski said. “I wanted to keep it R rated, I felt like that would be appropriate, and it's an expensive movie. It's a massive world we're creating and it's not a world we can simply go to locations to shoot.”
Verbinski added that unlike his current film, BioShock would have required an entire world to be built so the team could film underwater sequences. Verbinski was adamant it would have been one of the more expensive movies to make, and without the promise of a PG-13 film, which studios can sell to a broader audience, Universal just didn’t want to take a risk on it.
Now, following the success of Fox’s Deadpool, an R-rated superhero movie, Verbinski thinks it may have been an entirely different situation.
“So I think things have changed and maybe there will be another chance, but it's very difficult when you're eight weeks away from shooting a movie you really can see in your head and you've almost filmed the entire thing, so emotionally you're right at that transition from architect to becoming a contractor and that will be a difficult place to get back to,” Verbinski wrote.
In 2013, BioShock game designer Ken Levine confirmed the project had been officially cancelled after the studio cited having an issue with Verbinski’s proposed $200 million budget for the project. The director didn’t say whether or not he would return to the project if asked today, and there are currently no other BioShock adaptations in the works.
