It seems like a decaying, undersea dystopia can't quite catch a break on the big screen as Juan Carlos Fresnadillo joins Gore Verbinksi among the ranks of filmmakers unable to get a Bioshock movie made.
It all comes down to budgets, it seems: this time as with The Ring and Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski's attempts to get Bioshock onscreen, as back in 2009, the money men balked at an R-rated, north of a $100 million movie based on a video game. Universal, the studio backing the film, wasn't too keen on the $160 million price tag that Verbinski put together for the movie and it seems like Fresnadillo wasn't able to get the cost down to something the studio was happy with either.
There are a couple of things going on here, a lot of to do with the general currents swirling around in Universal HQ. Over the last couple of years, they've had a string of high-profile genre misses like Scott Pilgrim, The Wolfman, and The Thing that cost way more than they should have and didn't find an audience for whatever reason (too much quirk, too terrible, to whom do we direct this ill-advised prequel). I have to imagine they're looking at the decent but not great box office for the very expensive Prince of Persia at Disney ($200 million budget with just a $90 million take in the U.S., although it made its money back worldwide). Add an R-rating to the mix and Bioshock needs to happen on the cheap if it's going to happen at all.
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo is the writer-director of 28 Weeks Later which was... not great, but he was also responsible for the pretty fantastic Intacto back in 2001. I was sincerely curious about what he might have had in mind for the story, look, and feel of the movie.
[Source: Gamasutra]
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