Verbinski: BioShock Film Was Too Scary, Expensive To Get Funding

The BioShock film never got off the ground because no one would fund the stark, R-rated vision that director Gore Verbinski had for a big-screen rendition of Rapture's massive undersea dystopia, he says. Although Universal pictures planned a film based on 2K Games' successful game, signs of trouble first appeared in mid-2009, when a $160 million price tag outdid the constraints of the film's planned budget. By summer's end, Verbinski stepped down. "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 told film site Comingsoon.net. Given the haunting brutality of Rapture's underwater world-gone-mad, Verbinski said a PG-13 version just wouldn't cut it. "Because the R rating is inherent," he said. "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 is understood still to be in production under the purview of 28 Weeks Later director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, with Verbinski involved in a producer capacity. However, little news about the project surfaces to the press.