Netflix confirms our worst fears about its BioShock movie
Uh oh, we've got that 'sinking' feeling that Netflix's upcoming live-action BioShock movie could be lost at the sea. The streaming giant has something of a rocky relationship with video game adaptations, and while we loved the Castlevania anime, the less said about the live-action Resident Evil series, the better.
Still, Netflix has some serious doubloons in the bank, meaning it definitely has the budget to set sail with a BioShock adaptation worthy of the apocalyptic underwater adventure. Sadly, it seems that it's not all plain sailing with the upcoming movie, as Netflix has just confirmed our worst fears.
We're worried about Netflix's BioShock movie
There's a deluge of news coming out of San Diego Comic-Con, and while most will be looking ahead to July 27's Hall H Marvel showcase, there are already some major reveals. We've got an update about what's going on with the BioShock movie courtesy of SDCC (via Variety).
Producer Roy Lee claims that the BioShock movie is being "reconfigured" at Netflix. The Hunger Games Francis Lawrence is still attached, however, the live-action adaptation of 2K's game series will now be a "more personal" film. It all comes after Dan Lin replaced Scott Stuber as Netflix's Film Chief and has put more effort into a modest spending approach.
Lee told fans during Collider's Producers on Producers panel, "The new regime has lowered the budgets. So we're doing a much smaller version…It's going to be a more personal point of view, as opposed to a grander, big project." The good news is that Lawrence is still directing, suggesting he still has faith in the movie.
Netflix is apparently returning to a more traditional model of bonuses tied to viewership, with Lee adding, "It’s a chart: It’s this amount of viewers, you get this amount of compensation in terms of increased back end. It motivates the producers to actually do a movie that gets a bigger audience."
While it's true that we've seen some pretty amazing BioShock fan films made on only a fraction of the budget that Netflix has, we were hoping for a suitably massive adaptation that does the source material justice. After all, it can't be cheap to recreate Rapture without it looking like a CGI mess from a Zack Snyder movie.
News of a BioShock movie first surfaced in 2008, with Pirates of the Caribbean's Gore Verbinski due to direct. Way back when, Prison Break's Wentworth Miller was slated to play the lead, but things fell apart when Universal reportedly tried to wrangle Verbinski's budget and shared concerns over an R-rating.
The success of the Deadpool movies proved that R-rated movies have come a long way, while video game adaptations like The Last of Us and Fallout have done plenty of work redeeming the genre. Still, if a BioShock movie is once again sunk due to budget constraints, we'll be sending those responsible straight to Davy Jones' Locker.
