It feels like it’s taken the same amount of time to get BioShock to the screen as it does to create an underwater city. The history of adapting the beloved first-person shooter stretches back to 2008, only a year after the original game was released, when Gore Verbinski was attached to direct. Flash forward to 2025 (hey, that’s us), and now director Francis Lawrence, who has been appointed to the proceedings by Netflix in 2022, has given a new update on who has been tasked with penning the latest effort to send us to this world of Big Daddies and Little Sisters.
In an interview with IGN, The Long Walk director confirmed that Justin Rhodes is the latest to jot up a live-action version of the story. Rhodes wrote Terminator: Dark Fate and contributed to the CGI anthology series, Secret Level on Prime Video. “I just actually just got a draft. We have a meeting with the writer tomorrow [May 7th], so that’s definitely a very strong possibility as well,” Lawrence said.
It’d be great if this creative duo finally cracked the code and brought the beloved franchise to life after so long. When gamers were initially introduced to the world of BioShock, they stepped into the 1960s shoes of Jack, a passenger of a downed plane who finds refuge in this underwater world that has been left abandoned and fallen into ruin by its inhabitants, who have become murderous lunatics.
“It’s a tricky adaptation, so there’s lots of things to figure out and to get right.” It’s a task that might’ve become even trickier following the changing of Netflix Film Chief from Scott Stuber to Dan Lin. This alteration led to the film’s producer, Roy Lee, announcing at the San Diego Comic-Con 2024 that the project was set to be “reconfigured” and we’d be getting a “smaller version” of the story than initially planned.
“There’s regime changes at Netflix and so things stall out and get re-energized and stall out and get re-energized, and I think we’re in a pretty good place, honestly,” Lawrence explained. Whatever happens, we just ask that they kindly get a move on and finally bring us the BioShock film fans have always hoped to see. While we wait, why not check out our list of the 10 best video game movies ever here.
