Netflix's adaptation of BioShock is still in development, but the film's producer Roy Lee has revealed that the scope of the project has changed due to constraints.
Speaking during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con producer Roy Lee (The Lego Movie) explained — via Variety — that Netflix has lowered the budgets allocated to its movies. As a result, the BioShock movie is going from a "grander, big project" to something "more personal."
The BioShock live-action movie was first announced back in February 2022 as a partnership between Netflix and the game's producers 2K and Take-Two Interactive. In the time since, Dan Lin has replaced Scott Stuber as Netflix's film chief and has adopted a more conservative approach to the stream's movie strategy.
“The new regime has lowered the budgets,” Lee explained. “So we’re doing a much smaller version. … It’s going to be a more personal point of view, as opposed to a grander, big project.”
While the BioShock games are known for their immersive, dystopian, and visionary landscapes, the stories themselves do feel like they lend themselves better to a more personal approach. In the original BioShock game, players take control of a character named Jack, who discovers the underwater city of Rapture, built by business tycoon Andrew Ryan as an isolated utopia. What Jack, and subsequently the players, soon discover is that this utopia has gone to hell and all of its inhabitants have gone crazy, some of them superpowered by a genetic material known as ADAM.
2010's sequel, BioShock 2, returned to the dystopian underwater city of Rapture eight years after the events of the first game. In this story, players actually take control of Subject Delta, the first successful Big Daddy subject bonded to a Little Sister.
BioShock Infinite, the most recent game in the franchise, was released over a decade ago in 2013. In this game, players travel to the airborne city of Columbia as protagonist Booker DeWitt is sent to retrieve Elizabeth, a young woman held captive.
We don't know how closely Netflix's adaptation was going to follow the stories of these games, if at all. The latest update we got was back in November 2023, when Stuber said they were still waiting on a script.
Francis Lawrence is still directing the movie, presumably with a script from Logan and Blade Runner 2049 screenwriter Michael Green, who was previously attached to the film.
"[I've] been meeting regularly with [director] Francis Lawrence and his team to refine a draft to go back in," Green said in an update back in October 2023. "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."
It will be interesting to see how the changes to the budget impact this overall vision of a "great big sprawling nightmare world."
Budget aside, as long as it's got a solid story that similar in tone and feel to the games, the rest will fall into place.