The original "Bioshock" was a dark and moody take on Ayn Rand's philosphy run wild. Sounds perfect for a movie, right?
Talking at question and answer session at a BAFTA event in London on Monday night Ken Levine, co-founder of Irrational Games, the developer behind the Bioshock series and the upcoming "Bioshock: Infinite," explained how the failure of "The Watchmen" coupled with a change in directors lead to the project being killed. As Edge reports:
“There was a deal in place and it was actually in production at Universal and Gore Verbinski was directing it. And what happened was – this is my theory – is was a very big movie and Gore was very excited about it and he wanted to make a very dark, what he would call a hard rated horror film – an R rated film with alot of blood. Then "The Watchmen" came out – and I really liked "The Watchmen" – but it didn’t do well for whatever reason and the studio got cold feet about making an R rated $200 million film.”
“So they said ‘Gore, what about it if it was an $80 million film’ and enough time had gone by where Gore didn’t want to make an $80 million dollar film. And so they brought another director in and I didn’t really see the match there – Take 2 is one of those companies that gives alot of trust to their creative people and so they said to me ‘if you want to kill it Ken, kill it’. And I killed it.”
“Which was weird, having been a screenwriter going around begging to re-write any script to being in a position where you’re killing a movie that you worked so much on. It was saying – you know what, I don’t need to compromise. I had the ["Bioshock"] world and the world existed and I didn’t what to see it done in a way I didn’t think was right.”
This is not the first time Verbinski's has had a video game related projected cancelled. "Matter," a Kinect exclusive meant to get gamers to feel emotions previously unexpressed in games, was cancelled last week.