Posted in: Games, Movies, Netflix | Tagged: bioshock, bioshock movie

The BioShock Movie Is Still Happening But With A Smaller Budget

Producer Roy Lee has confirmed that the BioShock movie is still happening, but due to leadership changes, the budgets have been lowered.

We learned earlier this year from two members of the cast of The Old Guard 2 that the reason the film was still sitting in post-production was because of a leadership change at Netflix, which caused post-production to be shut down entirely. It sounds like that movie is back on track, and now we're starting to learn a little more about some other big projects at Netflix. A BioShock movie was announced in 2022, and the last we heard about it was from director Francis Lawrence while he was promoting The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in November 2023. However, producer Roy Lee was on Collider's Producers on Producers at San Diego Comic-Con (via Deadline). He revealed that the BioShock film was another movie that felt the impact of the leadership change.

"The new regime has lowered the budgets," said Lee. "So we're doing a much smaller version… It's going to be a more personal point of view, as opposed to a grander, more epic project."

Now, for the record, this is good news because Netflix has been spending money like they aren't ever going to run out of it for a long time now and getting almost nothing in return. The idea of slimming down budgets so movies don't have to crack half a billion at the worldwide box office to start making a profit is something the entire industry should be moving toward, streamers included. You can do a lot with a little, and as long as the Big Daddy and Rapture look good, BioShock will be just fine.

BioShock Has Been In Development Hell Since 2008

For a long time, it felt like video game adaptations could not get it together, and several were in such a low level of development hell that they were frozen in a lake of ice. Then, one by one, those projects started happening and getting off the ground. The Halo TV show actually came to pass, even if it didn't make much of an impact, and the Uncharted film was all right and did pretty damn well commercially. So it was time to cut free another project from that frozen lake in development hell, and Netflix announced in February 2022 that they would be making a movie based on BioShock.

People have been trying to make this film happen since 2008, but it never happened. Netflix announced the project, and months later, in August, The Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence would be directing it, with Michael Green writing the script. Things have been pretty quiet since then, and people's opinions on what a video game adaptation can and should have has only improved, with The Last of Us and The Super Mario Bros. Movie becoming critical and commercial success stories. At the end of November 2023, Lawrence praised the script, saying, "It's good; I have a really good script." Currently, there isn't a start date for the production or any casting information.

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