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Stop asking about the BioShock movie. It's dead, it's all Ken Levine's fault, and this is how it went down: Pirates of the Caribbean's Gore Verbinski announced he was directing a BioShock movie in 2008, and said he wanted to make it a hard-R-rated film with "a lot of blood," Irrational Games creative director Ken Levine said during a BAFTA talk, reported by Eurogamer.
And then Watchmen came out and bombed by Hollywood standards, and the BioShock studio got cold feet. Verbinski originally wanted $200 million, but executives would commit to just $80 million, "and Gore didn't want to make a $80 million film," Levine said. Verbinski brought in a new director, 28 Weeks Later's Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, but by March he was also out, and Levine had pulled the plug.
"They brought another director in, and I didn't really see the match there – and 2K's one of these companies that puts a lot of creative trust in people," Levine said. "So they said if you want to kill it, kill it. And I killed it."
A BioShock movie could get off the ground someday, maybe, Levine said. "It may happen one day, who knows, but it'd have to be the right combination of people." After all this public, back-and-forth teasing, we'd like to ask Levine if he'd kindly make a high-profile BioShock movie happen for real.
