Rumors and reports of Bioshock movie adaptations have been around longer than ScreenCrush has been around as a website. We’ve got articles in our archive dating back a decade about this version or that version coming together or falling apart; Pirates of the Caribbean and Rango’s Gore Verbinski had a Bioshock film project that was, in his words, “eight weeks prior to shooting” when the plug got pulled, supposedly because Verbinski’s film (from a script by Academy Award nominee John Logan) would have had an astronomical price tag and an R rating, and the studio involved decided that was not a winning combination.

Thankfully, Netflix is not adverse to spending astronomical sums on programming. They’ve now gotten the rights to make a Bioshock movie from Take-Two Interactive. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “no writer or filmmaker is on board at this time. The partnership deal has been in the works for almost a year.” Supposedly, an entire “cinematic universe” based on Bioshock could be in the offing.

The first Bioshock game debuted in 2007 from 2K Games and quickly became a critical and commercial success on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The most recent installment in the franchise, Bioshock Infinite, was released in 2013. After Verbinski dropped out of his Bioshock movie, filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo joined the project, but his vision suffered the same fate — supposedly Universal got skittish about dark, R-rated action movies after the relative failure of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen at the box office.

Netflix already has a massive, multi-series universe of shows based on The Witcher, and they recently announced a second season of Arcane, a series based on the League of Legends video game. So a Bioshock movie should fit right in.

Every Video Game Movie Ever Made, Ranked From Worst to Best

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