Our BioShock Movie Scoop Confirmed
We were right! The movie is on the way!
This article is more than 2 years old
Netflix is making a BioShock movie, and we called it first. Yesterday, we told Giant Freakin Robot readers that one of our trusted and proven sources had informed us that the streamer was getting behind a movie based on the hit video game series, with an official release to come soon. Earlier today, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed our scoop. THR says Netflix is partnering with Take-Two Interactive and is potentially looking to create a cinematic universe.
The BioShock film is clearly early in the development stage, considering THR reports that no talent is yet attached to the project — including writers, directors, or cast. Take-Two is reportedly working with Vertigo Entertainment, whose film projects include Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and James Franco’s The Disaster Artist. While things are still in early stages, THR says the parties involved have been working on the deal for close to a year.
This won’t be the first time someone has tried to adapt BioShock. Director Gore Verbinski of Pirates of the Caribbean fame was attached to a BioShock film for some time, but Universal Pictures jumped ship because of the proposed budget of $200 million. Last year, Verbinski told Collider that the studio said that with that big of a price tag, the film would need to be PG-13, while the director insisted it be R. Considering the film would have, in most likelihood, included little girls draining fluids out of corpses and massive Frankenstein’s-Monster-like creatures ripping through victim’s torsos with giant drills — yeah, R-rating sounds right.
Thanks to the last game released in the series, 2013’s BioShock Infinite, the series is already primed for the “cinematic universe” treatment. The first two games take place in the underwater city of Rapture, as does BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea — the two-part narrative expansion for the later game. However, the bulk of BioShock Infinite takes place in the flying city of Columbia, with an entirely new cast of characters. In the hopes of not spoiling too much for newcomers and the uninitiated, part of the last game’s story suggests all of the games exist in the same multiverse.
The premiere game of the series, 2007’s BioShock, is known for, among other things, having a much more cerebral premise than your average First Person Shooter. The underwater city of Rapture is built, you soon learn, by the objectivist Andrew Ryan — based on the controversial Ayn Rand — who believes in unbridled enterprise free from the interference of government or the church. By the time the hero enters Rapture, Ryan’s experiment has failed. The city is a crumbling ruin, populated mainly by the monstrous Big Daddies, the haunting Little Sisters, and the vicious Splicers — addicts whose minds have been destroyed by drugs giving them superhuman abilities.
BioShock 2 shares the same setting, with the hero taking on the role of a new character. Rather than Andrew Ryan, the new villain of Rapture represents the polar opposite ideology. Instead of capitalism without checks and balances, Sofia Lamb is a utilitarian and collectivist, but no less brutal.
BioShock Infinite gives us the fanatical antagonist Zachary Hale Comstock, leader of the airborne city of Columbia. Unlike either Lamb or Ryan, Comstock looks to the heavens for his ruling principles. At the same time, he merges his religion with the notion of American exceptionalism quite literally. When the hero first enters Columbia, some of the first things he sees are statues to the Founding Fathers, who are worshipped as saints in Comstock’s city.
Any or all of these settings, villains, and/or heroes could feature in the BioShock movie, but so far there’s very little information to impart. Wait to hear more from us as soon was we can get it to you. Would you kindly?
