There are not many franchises in the history of video games like BioShock. Ken Levine’s titles demonstrated, three generations ago, that it was possible to create video games with spectacular and action-packed worlds without sacrificing a captivating story. It was clear that, just like it has recently happened with Fallout or The Last of Us, BioShock was going to have a film adaptation, and finally it was Netflix who acquired the rights for a movie.
Several years have passed since this happened, and since then we hadn’t heard much about the project. In fact, some believed that it had been canceled and we would never see this great video game saga adapted. But since this year’s San Diego Comic Con, which has brought us other news like the Transformers One trailer, new developments have just been revealed… and unfortunately, they are not good.
A much more modest… and ‘personal’ movie
In his panel at Comic Con San Diego, producer Roy Lee, who is associated with the project, has announced significant changes in the BioShock movie. According to what he has said, the movie’s budget has been considerably reduced, which means that instead of making a big adaptation, they will make a ‘more personal’ representation. Spoiler: that doesn’t mean anything good.
Apparently, the culprit of everything is Dan Line, the new head of film at Netflix. After seeing that a lot of money was going to be invested in this project to make a faithful and effective adaptation, he decided to withdraw a large part of the budget, with the option of either abandoning the film or readapting it to its new conditions.
Finally, 2k and Take-Two Interactive would have decided to move forward with the project, but due to budget reasons they had to reconfigure everything to make a smaller and more personal film. We will see how all this turns out, but let’s say it’s not a very good start for a movie that adapts a video game.
