Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski has mentioned that his scrapped BioShock movie adaptation would have one way or the other included each of the unique sport’s endings to mess with the viewers’s heads.
Verbinski was connected to make a film model of the beloved sport again in 2008 alongside Common Studios, with a script in place from Gladiator and Skyfall scribe John Logan.
Alas, the mission by no means materialized resulting from prolonged wrangling over its deliberate $200 million funds — deemed dangerous resulting from it additionally aiming for an adults-only R ranking. Verbinski has beforehand mentioned the film got here inside eight weeks of capturing, earlier than plans faltered. Work continued to attempt to get the movie financed for a number of extra years, although BioShock creator Ken Levine confirmed the mission had been totally cancelled by 2013.
“I beloved this mission after we had been getting shut to creating it at Common,” Verbinski has mentioned now, discussing the mission in a reddit Q&A. “I used to be going to dive deeply into the Oedipal side and positively hold it laborious R with the Little Sisters, and the ‘selections’ the protagonist makes… and the implications.
“I had labored out a means with author John Logan to have each endings and I used to be wanting ahead to bringing that to the massive display screen and actually f***ing with folks’s heads,” he continued. “[We] had some nice designs for the Huge Daddies and your complete underwater demented art-deco aesthetic. Yearly I hear one thing concerning the mission, however I am undecided any studio is kind of keen to go the place I used to be headed.”
The unique BioShock has two endings, based mostly on the participant’s selections to both rescue or sacrifice the sport’s Little Sisters — and the 2 very totally different outcomes you get based mostly in your stage of mercy. The sport’s ‘comfortable’ ending — seen should you rescue each Little Sister — rewards the hero with a protracted life and the surviving sisters current on his eventual deathbed. Nevertheless, should you harvest any Little Sister, your character is proven as an alternative having influenced Rapture’s residents to consider that energy is all that issues. An ominous last cutscene then exhibits what appears to be a nuclear submarine being taken over in an assault.
The 2 endings are fairly totally different, then — a protracted and comfortable life or potential nuclear apocalypse — and it is unclear precisely how Verbinski’s film would have proven each. May one have been a dream sequence, exhibiting what may need been the choice consequence? Or would the film have introduced audiences with two doable futures, and left viewers unclear as to which truly performed out?
The later BioShock Infinite performed on the multiverse concept (“there’s all the time a lighthouse”!) nevertheless it’s value declaring that this was nonetheless years away on the level of Verbinski being concerned. Nonetheless, it is enjoyable to ponder how an adaptation may deal with the sport’s two endings now. Particularly as plans to adapt BioShock have since resumed — with Netflix now concerned in a possible adaptation.
Netflix introduced plans for a recent adaptation again in 2022, although latest years have seen the mission stall once more, as cuts modified the scope of the film, necessitating adjustments to its script. In September 2025, producer Roy Lee confirmed the mission remains to be in energetic improvement, with director Francis Lawrence on board to direct after ending his work on the forthcoming The Starvation Video games: Dawn on the Reaping.
“It is a difficult adaptation, so there’s a number of issues to determine and to get proper,” Lawrence instructed IGN beforehand. “There’s regime adjustments at Netflix, and so issues stall out and get re-energized and stall out and get re-energized, and I feel we’re in a reasonably good place, truthfully.”
Again on the earth of video video games, 2K confirmed final summer time that it had overhauled the equally long-awaited BioShock 4, which has been in improvement for the final decade. Amid layoffs and an additional delay to the mission’s launch, former Gears of Warfare head and Diablo franchise lead Rod Fergusson will now oversee the mission. Fergusson can even head up the sport’s improvement studio Cloud Chamber, because it makes an attempt to lastly wrestle the mission to launch.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s Information Editor. You’ll be able to attain Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or discover him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
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