Director Gore Verbinski said he ‘loved’ working on the BioShock movie and ‘was going to dive deeply into the Oedipal aspect’: ‘Every year I hear something about the project, but I’m not sure any studio is quite willing to go where I was headed’

Videogame adaptations to film and television are the new hotness—haven’t you heard? Markiplier’s Iron Lung flick just took the box office by storm, Yoshi’s laying eggs on the silver screen, and the best choice-driven fantasy RPG ever made is getting an HBO show that’ll do all the choosing for you. If you’re a videogame enjoyer of a certain tenure, you’ll even remember the BioShock movie. Not the new one Netflix is developing, but the old one that got killed before it ever reached the finish line.

It was set to be directed by Gore Verbinski, who directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Rango, and the American version of The Ring. Tonally, BioShock sits somewhere between those three things, so it may have even been good; Verbinski himself seemed to think so, as he explained in a Reddit AMA yesterday.

“I loved this project when we were getting close to making it at Universal. I was going to dive deeply into the Oedipal aspect and definitely keep it hard R with the Little Sisters, and the ‘choices’ the protagonist makes… and the consequences,” Verbinski recalled in his comment. “I had worked out a way with writer John Logan to have both endings and I was looking forward to bringing that to the big screen and really fucking with people’s heads. Had some great designs for the Big Daddies and the entire underwater demented art-deco aesthetic.”

It certainly sounds like he had an interest in what made BioShock tick, and even as a perpetual skeptic of videogame films (the Warcraft movie burned me pretty bad) the thought of a Big Daddy rendered properly in live action sounds pretty snazzy. He’s talked about the incorporation of multiple endings in the past, like in this Collider report, where he again compares the game’s story to Oedipus Rex.

In that article, he also reckons that the reason the movie got killed was because of that R rating he insisted on in yesterday’s AMA. As he told Collider in 2021, “‘Watchmen’ had just come out right before that or something. So, there was a little bit of, these movies need to be PG-13. If they cost [$200 million], they need to be PG-13.”

Netflix’s BioShock film is still in the works, but it’s a way off due to director Francis Lawrence’s packed schedule. Its budget took a big hit back in 2024, so even though it’s based on the original game, it may have a smaller scope than you’d expect or Verbinski had planned.