The BioShock movie that never happened came down to a phone call that went badly. Guillermo del Toro, asked by IGN about adapting video games, confirmed he was once in talks on 2K’s 2007 shooter and called the negotiations “probably one of the most disastrous calls I’ve ever had. So no. F*ck no.”
“We had a very contentious call about a couple of games,” he told IGN. His objection to the form is structural rather than personal.
“They may be cinematically similar in terms of the camera moving and this and that, but the storytelling is very different because you’re not solving puzzles. You’re not assembling,” del Toro said. “You have to give the illusion of an infinite sandbox, and you lead audiences to the right or to the left through their own decisions, quote-unquote, but you sort of have to corner them.”
Universal Spent Six Years on a BioShock Movie
Universal and Take-Two set the adaptation up in 2007, with John Logan writing and Gore Verbinski directing toward a 2010 release. The budget climbed toward $200 million. Verbinski left for Rango and moved to producer, and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo of 28 Weeks Later took over. The studio balked at an R rating after Watchmen underperformed, a cut to $80 million was floated, and Ken Levine ended the deal in March 2013. “I didn’t want to see it done in a way that I didn’t think was right,” Levine said at the time.
Two More Game Projects Died on Him
InSane, a planned trilogy of survival horror games del Toro was developing with THQ, went down with the publisher in 2012. Three years later Konami cancelled Silent Hills, the project behind the P.T. demo he built with Hideo Kojima and Norman Reedus. A Silent Hill reboot is moving now without either of them.
Del Toro’s shelf of unmade films is long and thoroughly documented, from At the Mountains of Madness to Hellboy 3. The BioShock call stands out because he is explicit about the consequence. He stopped taking the meetings.
Netflix has had its own BioShock in development since 2022, with Francis Lawrence directing and Michael Green writing, and it has yet to shoot. Nineteen years after Rapture opened, the best adaptation of BioShock is still BioShock.
