BioShock Movie News: Ken Levine Explains Why Film Died

At one point in time, the BioShock movie was set to be the biggest video game adaptation of all time. In the four years since then however, the project has been quietly brushed under the rug.

Speaking at a BAFTA event in London yesterday, Irrational Games creative director Ken Levine explained the situation. Despite having Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinksi attached, Universal executives got cold feet about greenlighting an R-rated film with a $200 million budget. Levine points to 2009's Watchmen movie, which similarly featured a hard R-rating and a large budget.

"There was a deal in place and it was actually in production at Universal, and Gore Verbinski was directing it,” Levine explained. "And what happened was--this is my theory--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."

Universal requested a reduced budget in the range of $80 million and a PG-13 rating, which caused Verbinski to leave the project. Another director was brought in to replace him, one that Levine felt didn't match the vision Irrational had for the project.

"And so they brought another director in and I didn’t really see the match there. Take Two is one of those companies that gives a lot of trust to their creative people and so they said to me, ‘If you want to kill it Ken, kill it’. And I killed it."

While Levine himself did not name the replacement, it's been confirmed that Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, director of 28 Weeks Later, was brought in when Verbinski dropped out. Fresnadillo himself left the project in February of 2012, which may have been around the time that Ken Levine decided to end the venture.

"Which was weird, having been a screenwriter going around begging to re-write any script to being in a position where you’re killing a movie that you worked so much on," Levine concluded. "It was saying, 'You know what? I don’t need to compromise’. I had the [Bioshock] world, and I didn’t want to see it done in a way I didn’t think was right."