BioShock Director Drops Out, Movie Delayed (Again)

The film adaptation of the wildly popular first-person shooter, BioShock, is encountering more problems, as director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later, Intacto) announces he is no longer involved with the project.

Fresnadillo tells Indiewire, “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 videogame company, they have to reach some kind of agreement about the budget and the rating.”

This is the second director the movie has lost. Gore Verbinski (Pirates of Caribbean) left a year ago for a producer credit.

It seems the studio has cut funding, unhappy with the “R” rating, which doesn’t do as well as PG-13 in the box office. That’s a big part of the reason Verbinski left the director’s chair. Now, with another director gone for the same reason, it seems they will never come to an agreement.

“I couldn’t really get past anybody that would spend the money that it would take to do it and keep an ‘R’ rating,” Verbinski said in an interview with comingsoon.net, after abandoning the director’s chair. “Alternately, I wasn’t really interested in pursuing a ‘PG-13’ version, because the ‘R’ rating is inherent–Little Sisters and injections and the whole thing. I just wanted to really, really make it a movie where, four days later, you’re still shivering and going, ‘Jesus Christ!’ … It’s a movie that has to be really, really scary, but you also have to create a whole underwater world, so the price tag is high. We just didn’t have any takers on an ‘R’-rated movie with that price tag.”

The film has already been delayed several times due to an out of control budget. Last estimates were around $160 million, much more than the studios wanted to spend on an “R” rating.

With little progress made in the four years since its original announcement, the future of a BioShock movie is looking bleak.

Arguably the best opening sequence in a video game, ever. With such a great story line, the game already lends itself well to a silver screen adaptation. Let’s hope they finally get the film finished, and keep it true to the game so many fans love.

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