Adding to their growing list of video game adaptations, Netflix has taken a further step forward in bringing the cinematic Bioshock to the big screen. Netflix seems intent on getting as many video game properties as they can, with their recent attempt at Resident Evil being critically panned, and their upcoming Playstation adaptation of Horizon: Zero Dawn getting their showrunner in Steve Blackman of Umbrella Academy fame.
One of the more cinematic games, Bioshock has an incredible story ripe for the big screen and it seems Netflix has realized that. Before we all get excited though, it’s still a ways off, so we won’t be seeing Rapture just yet.
Bioshock
Anyone that loves a good story in their video games should have or will have played the seminal Bioshock, the 2007 sci-fi shooter from 2K Games. Players end up in a shipwreck, floating across a tumultuous sea, before landing at a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. Thankful for solid land and relative safety, it’s quickly obvious the place we choose to survive isn’t a place to survive at all.
Rapture itself is the main character of the game, a sprawling subterranean city under the waves of the ocean above. Created as a utopia for the brightest and best to think and invent, it quickly succumbs to the same things all civilizations do in one regard or another; drugs, violence, and a need for rule. The story is top-notch and for a long time was considered the benchmark for story-driven games, at least before the likes of The Last of Us and Red Dead Redemption 2 came out, anyhow.
Featuring a speechless protagonist was a brave choice in a world of games that gave the player speech choices, but it proved an astute one, affording the player more time to drink in the surroundings and its inhabitants, rather than worried about how we’d react or what we’d say in the moment.
“Would you kindly?” – Andrew Ryan
Still, a phrase that’ll trigger all sorts of flashbacks to the game, it further points to how good the story of the game is fifteen years on, and how Netflix has got a lot on its hands to deliver a faithful adaptation.
Bioshock Signs Director And Writer
The streaming giant recently announced they’ve landed their talent for both the directing of the film and the scribe writing it. Hunger Games franchise director Francis Lawrence has been tapped up to direct, with the idea being he’ll finish up the next installment of the franchise in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and then jump straight into filming Bioshock.
It’s going to be written by Michael Green, no stranger to source material adaptations, as he penned Logan, and the recent sequel to Bladerunner, Bladerunner 2049. Plot details are largely unknown at the moment, with it not being written that’s not a surprise, but the main question fans will have will be whether we’re going to be going to Rapture, from the first two games, or the less good, but still enticing Columbia from the third game, Bioshock: Infinite.
Slap an R-rating on it, give me a Big Daddy marauding towards the screen in typical Bioshock terror, and you’ll make plenty of us happy. Scared. But happy.
Source: ComicBook
Follow us for more entertainment coverage on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
