In an interview with Edge at last night’s BAFTA event, Irrational Games’ Ken Levine discussed why he ended the pre-production for the already announced Bioshock movie. Having been announced in 2008, the film adaptation to Irrational’s horror title was set to be directed by Pirates of the Caribbean’s Gore Verbinski. However, Verbinski ended up walking away from the project when the studio reduced his budget and began pushing for a PG-13 rating. Levine stated that the poor reception of 2009’s The Watchmen may have been to blame:
It’s 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 a lot 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.
Levine went on to state that he didn’t feel that the next director to be assigned to the adaptation (who he did not name), was right for the project. Upon consulting his team, he decided to pull the plug on the film, rather than have Bioshock brought to the big screen in a way that didn’t “feel right” to him.
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