Netflix sure did sound excited about its BioShock movie back when it announced it in 2022, but it seems like passions have cooled. In a recent chat at San Diego Comic Con (via Variety), the film's producer Roy Lee informed fans that Netflix's "new regime has lowered the budgets… so we're doing a much smaller version" than was originally planned.
That "new regime" is Dan Lin, chairman of Netflix Films as of April this year. Back in the heady days of 2022, that responsibility (under a different name) was the purview of executive Scott Stuber, who was apparently far more bullish on Netflix's homegrown movie-making efforts. It looks like Lin's ambitions are more modest, and BioShock is being scaled back as a result.
Lee says the film's gonna be from "a more personal point of view" instead of a "grander, big project." Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence is still on-board, though.
I do wonder what's become of the film's first version. Two years ago, Lawrence said that Blade Runner 2049 writer Michael Green was "in the middle of writing it," and that the crew "already have our take, outline, and all that kind of stuff, so that's all done." He even tipped his hat to the "real ideas and philosophies underneath the game property," that he was excited to capture on-film. Has all that gone out the window? Or has a reduction in scope actually let the crew zero in on the parts of BioShock that might be interesting to put on the silver screen at the expense of the big, pricey setpieces?
I hope it's the latter, naturally. Frankly, a reduced scope suits a BioShock movie just fine, though I'm sceptical anyway. BioShock is so much a game about games that I wonder how well it will transfer to film-stock. Still, I think it stands a better chance of being good if it's giving me something a bit more reflective and creepy rather than a whizzbang collection of plasmid effects and gun battles.
And either way, we can all share a chuckle at the forces of capital and the market conspiring to undermine Andrew Ryan's Randian utopia once more. It's only appropriate, really.
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