Director Reveals Why Universal Canceled The BioShock Movie

There are plenty of video game movie adaptations that have come out and some have been better than others. However, there’s certainly been more of a surge of video game adaptations in the market lately. So it’s a bit surprising to see that one IP in particular that would have had plenty of fans interested see unfolded on the big screen was ultimately killed off. 

As mentioned, there was plenty of video game film projects being handled right now. Sonic The Hedgehog has a sequel, Resident Evil is receiving a reboot from the original cinematic experience, Uncharted has a prequel movie in post-production, Halo is soon to be featured in a television series alongside The Last of Us. Now fans might not recall this but there was a BioShock movie in the works several years ago at this point.

Attached to the project was director Gore Verbinski who you might be familiar with from the series of The Pirate of the Caribbean films. Recently, Gore spoke with Collider where the subject of BioShock came up. According to Gore the reason this film never happened was simply due to the demands he made for the project if he was to stay for production. It really seemed like the demands made were to bring out a big cinematic film piece for the IP.

There were two big demands that Gore made for Universal Pictures and that the budget would need to be $200 million. Secondly, the film would need to be rated R which would allow Gore to bring out big sets and keep the narrative mature much like how the game was. While it looked like things might have gone to Gore’s way for the budget, it would seem that there was a push back for the rating as Universal wanted a PG-13 rating to appeal to a wider audience. Eventually, the project was scrapped before any of the production really could get started.

Source: Collider