Mortal Kombat may have been his sole focus over the last 12 months, but screenwriter Greg Russo already has a wish list of video games he’d love to be involved in bringing to the big screen.
A huge self-professed gamer, Russo not only considers BioShock to be one of the finest pieces of interactive entertainment ever made (like most), but one of his personal favorites. The original, which sees protagonist Jack unwillingly stumble upon a dystopian underwater city following a mid-transit airplane crash, won the hearts and minds of millions when it released back in 2007, garnering critical acclaim for its subversive storytelling and incredible art design. The bold new IP, a spiritual successor to System Shock, single-handedly put Ken Levine on the map as a bonafide industry auteur and ultimately led to the release of two sequels.
Hollywood has attempted in the past, of course, to repurpose the series for cinema, with Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski intended to take the helm. Despite warning executives that such a project would require an R-rating at the very least due to its mature content and themes, though, production ceased before ever getting off the ground due to a reluctance to fund what would have been an expensive film with restricted audiences.
That being the case, it’s unlikely that the story of Andrew Ryan’s ill-fated attempts at creating a wondrous deep sea utopia will ever transcend its native medium, but that doesn’t mean Russo is any less deterred from being involved, should a film ever go ahead. Speaking in a recent interview, he told WGTC’s Scott Campbell: “I’ve probably made this known, but one of my favorite games is BioShock. So I would love to do BioShock.”
As for how one would broach such an infamously hard-to-make movie, Russo is largely in agreement with Verbinski’s view that an adaptation, at its core, would need to be a big budget horror flick in order to do the franchise justice. Sadly, those two go together as well as chalk and cheese, so one certainly shouldn’t hold out hope for the current situation to change.
On the flip side, publisher 2K confirmed last year that BioShock 4 is in the early stages of development. See here for all the latest news.