Why are we not surprised? 2K’s phenomenal first-person shooter was supposed to be turned into a movie. The pre-production for the film has pretty much died and it’s largely because of age restrictions. Gore Verbinski was in charge of it; he’s directed films like the first three Pirates of the Caribbean and horror flick The Ring. He knows how to do films that have a lot of sea stuff, and films that have a lot of scary stuff. In other words: he was the perfect guy to do a BioShock film.
He’s just chatted to ComingSoon.com about his latest film Rango, but he also managed to give an update on the now halted BioShock development. It turns out that Verbinski, quite rightly, felt that the BioShock film had to be R-rated in order to stay faithful to the source material. Unfortunately the budget required for a decent realisation of BioShock on the big screen was too high for Universal Studios, who didn’t want to drop $160 million on an R-rated film.
“I couldn’t really get past anybody that would spend the money that it would take to do it and keep an R rating. Alternately, I wasn’t really interested in pursuing a PG-13 version. Because the R rating is inherent. Little Sisters and injections and the whole thing. I just wanted to really, really make it a movie where, four days later, you’re still shivering and going, “Jesus Christ!”… It’s a movie that has to be really, really scary, but you also have to create a whole underwater world, so the pricetag is high. We just didn’t have any takers on an R-rated movie with that pricetag.”
Source: ComingSoon [via Eurogamer] Header: Volpin Props
Last Updated: February 16, 2011
