When Gore Verbinski dropped directing duties for the BioShock movie citing the R-rating’s likely effect on ticket sales, dreams of a film that would actually do justice to the game diminished. Now that even the 28 Weeks Later director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo has fled, the sub-marine dystopia is dead in the water. The BioShock film is officially on hold.
Fresnadillo told The Playlist, “To be honest, by now, I’m completely out of that, and developing other stuff. Right now it’s on hold. The studio and the video game company, they have to reach some kind of agreement about the budget and the rating.”
It’s a constant bugbear of mine that studios shy away from financing R-rated films, which forces filmmakers to slash wholly inappropriate movies into PG-13s (seriously, the Batman films are not suitable for kids!). BioShock would necessarily be a hard R, but I think R-rated films need to be made. There’ll never be a market for grown-up films if nobody can get the funding to make them, but undoubtedly studios are cautious in this economy. Perhaps there’s an irony that the film – about a society implodes from its own greed and selfishness – is sunk by those very conditions.
Still, if Universal Studios are still looking for a director, they could ask Jared Potter.
Potter claims that the world created by 2K and Irrational left an impression on him unlike any game he had ever played. “I was drawn immediately into the idea of making a fanfilm. Not a parody, not a fake trailer mashup of other people’s work, but a truly original creation set within the world of the games. I wanted to go there. I wanted to visit the city of Rapture, and that desire kept me going through the months of post-production. It has turned out to be one of the greatest experiences I’ve had working on a movie, and I hope to somehow get the chance to return.”
The six-minute short is a prequel to the events of the first two games, in which a group of splicers “have something planned that will change the course of Andrew Ryan’s vision of utopia”. The film probably won’t mean much to viewers unfamiliar with the games, but to anyone who has visited the underwater city of Rapture, it will send shivers down your spine.
.
.
Here’s the trailer for BioShock Infinite:
.
.
Reinspired 
Argh! Always the good stuff gets pulled out from under us like so many unsecured rugs. Bioshock still to this day remains my favorite game of all time for uncountable reasons, and to see someone at least try to bring that to screen was exhilarating. For an amateur filmmaker, Jared Potter’s work on that trailer was astounding. With the bleak sense of subtlety and minimalism (partially a product of budget restrains, I realize), he brought Rapture to life once more.
I very much enjoyed reading your post. I found more here than I would any other site for games news–you’re not out to flaunt the developers, they aren’t paying you, you’re presenting the facts in detail, and added some delightful bits of media and references for us to enjoy. I’ll return in the future.
Good writing, fellow.