Director Gore Verbinski said he ‘loved’ working on the BioShock movie and ‘was going to dive deeply into the Oedipal aspect’: ‘Every year I hear something about the project, but I’m not sure any studio is quite willing to go where I was headed’
Videogame adaptations to film and television are the new hotness—haven’t you heard? Markiplier’s Iron Lung flick just took the box office by storm, Yoshi’s laying eggs on the silver screen, and the best choice-driven fantasy RPG ever made is getting an HBO show that’ll do all the choosing for you. If you’re a videogame enjoyer of a certain tenure, you’ll even remember the BioShock movie. Not the new one Netflix is developing, but the old one that got killed before it ever reached the finish line.
It was set to be directed by Gore Verbinski, who directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Rango, and the American version of The Ring. Tonally, BioShock sits somewhere between those three things, so it may have even been good; Verbinski himself seemed to think so, as he explained in a Reddit AMA yesterday.
“I loved this project when we were getting close to making it at Universal. I was going to dive deeply into the Oedipal aspect and definitely keep it hard R with the Little Sisters, and the ‘choices’ the protagonist makes… and the consequences,” Verbinski recalled in his comment. “I had worked out a way with writer John Logan to have both endings and I was looking forward to bringing that to the big screen and really fucking with people’s heads. Had some great designs for the Big Daddies and the entire underwater demented art-deco aesthetic.”
