Rumors of a BioShock movie adaptation are almost as old as the franchise itself. Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinksi was even attached to the film for a time before dropping out of the project in 2009, leaving the rights to a movie version of Take-Two’s famous dystopian franchise to move from Universal to Sony in 2014.
Sadly, it seems unlikely that the BioShock movie will ever be able to make it past pre-production. While the game helped bring new ways of telling interactive stories to a wider audience, there are some great reasons that BioShock‘s story could adapt particularly well to the big screen.
The story of the original BioShock is told largely through audio logs left behind by the scattered residents of Rapture shortly before the collapse of their society. This was a technique pioneered in 1994’s System Shock, to which both BioShock and Deus Ex are considered spiritual successors.
In terms of choices, BioShock gives the player character one main moral dilemma throughout the game. After defeating a Big Daddy the can kill that Big Daddy’s Little Sister for ADAM, which they can use to gain or upgrade new abilities through genetic modification. The player also has the option to let the Little Sisters go, at the risk of being less powerful later in the game.
While BioShock was a groundbreaking game upon its release, neither of its two main storytelling devices hold up particularly well. The idea that Rapture‘s elites would incriminate themselves by recording details diaries of their wrongdoings seems convenient to say the least. To make matters worse, BioShock‘s main moral choice really doesn’t have that much effect on the game. Players can harvest the Little Sisters, but it’s easy to complete the game without doing so once, meaning very little pressure is actually put on the player. As a result, killing the Little Sisters or not feels less like something motivated by the game’s mechanics, and more a matter of the player’s taste in story.
A BioShock movie could be able to tell Rapture’s story without either of these problems. With a set, linear narrative, the story of Rapture could unfold far more naturally even if Jack arrived after the city fell into chaos. Similarly, the a film version could significantly increase the personal stakes, showing how Jack is forced to harvest Little Sisters to survive – or, at the very least, sees BioShock‘s infamous Splicers attempting to do so.
Not only that, but a movie adaptation of the first game could help fix its ending by removing BioShock‘s underwhelming final boss battle and replacing it with something that feels more tied to the themes of the story. BioShock undoubtedly pushed the boundaries of what many critics believed was possible when it came to video game storytelling, but in many ways its premise and story contained so much ambition that they were constricted by its medium. The big philosophical ideas, the horror, and the moral decisions in BioShock all worked well, but they also felt larger than the first game was able to manage at times.
Perhaps a BioShock movie will be released some day. One problem for the original R-rated project’s pre-production was finding buyers. With plenty more mainstream R-rated movies becoming box office hits, it’s possible fans of the franchise might get to see BioShock on the silver screen in all its gory glory. Until then, new development studio Cloud Chamber is reported to be working on BioShock 4, which may be taking the series’ storytelling style in a whole new direction by adding RPG-style mechanics to BioShock.
BioShock 4 is reportedly in development by Cloud Chamber Studio.
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