Netflix has asked Francis Lawrence, “Would you kindly direct our BioShock movie?” The director has agreed, as the BioShock movie adaptation has been one of the hotter tickets around Hollywood and could net him another popular franchise to play with after he finishes shooting the Hunger Games prequel film. Netflix, partnering with 2K Games and Take-Two Interactive, has also tapped Michael Green to write the screenplay, per Deadline.
Netflix announced that it was making the film back in February and since then has been searching for the right director to helm it. Picking Lawrence, however, means there will be even more of a delay. As mentioned, the director is currently shooting The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and won’t be finished with that for a bit. As such, Michael Green is penning the BioShock movie screenplay now, and Francis Lawrence will hop into pre-production as director once he’s finished with The Hunger Games. That means there isn’t any clear time for the film to get underway or even a target date for release at the moment.
The BioShock movie has been long in the works and had plenty of misfires, (Gore Verbinski was once attached.) but it seems that Netflix will finally be the one to get it off the ground. Green has a long and varied track record of developing major motion pictures that veer from action adventure to thoughtful epics, so he seems like a good choice to helm an adaptation of a game that veers into both realms. The question will be if a game that was so much about player agency and choice and video games themselves can actually be turned into a movie as groundbreaking. Most likely, we’ll get something that looks like BioShock but can’t capture the magic of it.
