Early last year came the news that Netflix had taken over the long-gestating screen adaptation of the award-winning dystopian video game franchise “BioShock” with plans for a film adaptation.
In August last year, filmmaker Francis Lawrence (“Constantine,” “I Am Legend”) came on board to direct whilst Michael Green (“Blade Runner 2049,” “Logan”) had been hired to adapt the script. The plan was for Lawrence to do the film after he wrapped “The Hunger Games” prequel.
Several things have changed since then – the critical and ratings success of HBO’s “The Last of Us” and the runaway box-office hit with “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” has finally shaken off some of the thinkin that games-to-film adaptations can’t work.
Then there have been the strikes which have slowed everyone down. Speaking with Collider this week, Green was asked how the adaptation is going and he says progress is being made and he’s been working closely with Lawrence to refine the script:
“You have to measure your words, or you’ll start to see a laser pointer at my forehead from the Netflix legal. Netflix has been amazing about it. They were excited about it before the strike, they’re excited about it now, post-strike.
Yes, I got called, the, ‘How’s it coming along?’ the minute the strike was over, ‘You about ready…?’ Been meeting regularly with Francis Lawrence and his team to refine a draft to go back in. We’re all optimistic. We all love it. It’s a great big sprawling nightmare world we wanna see real. So, here’s hoping. I would love to have an update for you soon.”
First released in 2007, the first two games were set in the 1960s in the Art Deco stylings of the undersea city of Rapture – a fallen scientific objectivist utopia consumed years before by its own ambitions and lack of morality and regulation. It is now the dominion of crazed genetic experiments.
The third was set in the 1910s in the Neoclassical-styled sky city of Columbia, a society on the opposite extreme – one founded on theocratic megalomania, fueled by religious dogma, and fundamentally riddled with issues of bigotry, inequality and corruption.
The franchise has sold more than 39 million copies worldwide across its three titles and their various editions and collections.
