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Once he wraps work on the upcoming “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping,” filmmaker Francis Lawrence’s next feature is presumed to be the long-awaited film adaptation of the “BioShock” video game franchise for Netflix.
Michael Green (“Blade Runner 2049,” “Logan”) is penning the script for the film, which will be based on the famed 2007 game. It will finally bring to an end to a rather long development history for the title.
At one time, the project was looking to go-ahead under the helm of “The Ring” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” original trilogy director Gore Verbinski, but concerns over its sizeable budget and R rating appeared to quash the project at the time.
Out promoting his raved about new film “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,” Verbinski says he loved working on the “BioShock” film and isn’t sure any studio is willing to go to the place it needs to. 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.
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 f–king with people’s heads. Had some great designs for the Big Daddies and the entire underwater demented art-deco aesthetic. Every year I hear something about the project, but I’m not sure any studio is quite willing to go where I was headed.”
Scale is indeed an issue with producer Roy Lee last year indicating during “The Long Walk” press rounds that Lawrence’s take will offer a “more personal point of view” than the kind of larger-scale epic Verbinski was likely aiming for.
The story is set in the 1960s in the Art Deco stylings of the undersea city of Rapture – a fallen scientific objectivist utopia consumed years before by its own ambitions and lack of morality and regulation. It is now the dominion of crazed genetic experiments.
The franchise has sold more than 39 million copies worldwide across its three titles and their various editions and collections.
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