WATCHMEN made Ken Levine kill his BIOSHOCK film

A film adaptation of BioShock started production in 2008 at Universal Studios and the news quickly made its way around the internet. This was looking like a serious adaptation of the hit game, a potentially good videogame film for gamers who had been (and still are) left without a single good adaptation. Pirates of the Caribbean helmer Gore Verbinski was attached to direct and reportedly sought to make the film every bit as adult as the material deserved. He wanted a hard R rating, full of every bit of mayhem you'd expect from the violent world of Rapture. The only problem was the cost.

After Watchmen failed at the box office Universal balked at spending $200 million on an R-rated geek adaptation, even if BioShock was the biggest thing in gaming at the time. Verbinski was offered two options - make a more box office-friendly PG-13 film or make the R-rated film with a mere $80 million. They must have forgotten to ask him kindly because he walked from the project instead.

Eurogamer reports that at a BAFTA talk promoting BioShock Infinite this week creator Ken Levine finally revealed that the project is good and dead, and that he was the one to dig the grave. “They brought another director in, and I didn’t really see the match there,” said Levine. “and 2K’s one of these companies that puts a lot of creative trust in people. So they said if you want to kill it, kill it. And I killed it.”

The director he’s talking about might be Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, director of Intacto and (the underrated!) 28 Weeks Later, who was announced as new director of the project last year. But no one’s going to be directing it anytime soon, as this is Levine’s baby and he only wants it if they do justice to his vision.

“It was weird, as having been a screenwriter, begging to do anything, and then killing a movie on something you’d worked on so much,” said Levine. “It was saying I don’t need to compromise - how many times in life do you not need to compromise? It comes along so rarely, but I had the world, the world existed and I didn’t want to see it done in a way that I didn’t think was right,” Levine said. “It may happen one day, who knows, but it’d have to be the right combination of people.”