The upcoming movie based on 2K's Bioshock franchise has been put on hold until an agreement can be reached regarding budget, while the film's director has left the project.
2K parent company Take-Two originally stated back in 2008 that the Bioshock movie was likely to launch at the same time as the Bioshock 3 video game (now known as Bioshock Infinite).
However, in 2009 the film's director Gore Verbinksi stepped down as 28 Weeks Later director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo took the reins on the project. Verbinski later said that his idea for the film never got off the ground because no one would fund the stark, R-rated vision that he had for a big-screen rendition of Rapture's massive undersea dystopia.
Fresnadillo has now told IndieWire that he is no longer working on the film, and admitted that an agreement over the budget for the movie has still not been reached.
"To be honest, by now, I’m completely out of that, and developing other stuff," he said. "Right now it's on hold. The studio and the videogame company, they have to reach some kind of agreement about the budget and the rating."
Gamasutra has contacted 2K to find out what the next step for the movie is, and whether a new director has been found to replace Fresnadillo.
Eh, not surprised and really not that interested in the idea of making a movie from a game like BioShock. Let's be honest here, the game had a tremendous amount of detail and story, one that not even a 2 hour movie could ever convey on the big screen. Just look at all the other "game to movie" ideas that have been released. IMHO, the only good G2M was Mortal Kombat :P
Lord of the Rings has a tremendous amount of detail and story and Peter Jackson still did a pretty good job with each film. I guess I was hoping for Bioshock to make the first solid translation from game to film. Ah well.
Sounds like they are trying to make the movie as cheap as possible. Just quit, there's no point in making a movie about a game with a story so tied to the medium it was designed for.
It's the question of the rating for the movie that I find interesting.
BioShock has an "M" ESRB / PEGI 18+ rating. So why would Take-Two object to Verbinski's artistic vision of an R-rated movie adaptation?
One cynical guess might be that Take-Two knows that kids are able to obtain and play M-rated games and wanted a PG-13 movie to drive BioShock 3 sales. But I don't know whether that's accurate -- I'm curious if there's a better (less cynical) explanation for why the rating of the movie became an issue.
Just another of the weird intersections of business and art and tech and culture and law that computer games seem to run into all the time now....
The rating dispute might not be from Take-Two, but from their film studio partners (can't remember which studio that is at the moment). That's just speculation on my part, but it would make more sense...
BioShock has an "M" ESRB / PEGI 18+ rating. So why would Take-Two object to Verbinski's artistic vision of an R-rated movie adaptation?
One cynical guess might be that Take-Two knows that kids are able to obtain and play M-rated games and wanted a PG-13 movie to drive BioShock 3 sales. But I don't know whether that's accurate -- I'm curious if there's a better (less cynical) explanation for why the rating of the movie became an issue.
Just another of the weird intersections of business and art and tech and culture and law that computer games seem to run into all the time now....