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 venture by no means materialized because of prolonged wrangling over its deliberate $200 million price range — deemed dangerous because of it additionally aiming for an adults-only R score. Verbinski has beforehand mentioned the film got here inside eight weeks of taking pictures, 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 venture had been totally cancelled by 2013.
“I beloved this venture after we had been getting shut to creating it at Common,” Verbinski has mentioned now, discussing the venture in a reddit Q&A. “I used to be going to dive deeply into the Oedipal side and undoubtedly preserve it onerous R with the Little Sisters, and the ‘decisions’ the protagonist makes… and the penalties.
“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 and actually f***ing with folks’s heads,” he continued. “[We] had some nice designs for the Huge Daddies and the total underwater demented art-deco aesthetic. Yearly I hear one thing about the venture, however I am undecided any studio is sort of prepared to go the place I used to be headed.”
The unique BioShock has two endings, based mostly on the participant’s decisions to both rescue or sacrifice the sport’s Little Sisters — and the two very totally different outcomes you get based mostly in your degree of mercy. The sport’s ‘pleased’ ending — seen in case you rescue each Little Sister — rewards the hero with a protracted life and the surviving sisters current on his eventual deathbed. Nevertheless, in case you harvest any Little Sister, your character is proven as a substitute having influenced Rapture’s residents to consider that energy is all that issues. An ominous ultimate cutscene then reveals what seems to be a nuclear submarine being taken over in an assault.
The 2 endings are fairly totally different, then — a protracted and pleased 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 might need been the various consequence? Or would the film have offered audiences with two doable futures, and left viewers unclear as to which really performed out?
The later BioShock Infinite performed on the multiverse principle (“there’s all the time a lighthouse”!) nevertheless it’s value mentioning that this was nonetheless years away at the level of Verbinski being concerned. Nonetheless, it is enjoyable to ponder how an adaptation would possibly 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 current years have seen the venture stall once more, as cuts modified the scope of the film, necessitating modifications to its script. In September 2025, producer Roy Lee confirmed the venture remains to be in lively 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 tough adaptation, so there’s heaps of issues to determine and to get proper,” Lawrence informed IGN beforehand. “There’s regime modifications 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, actually.”
Again in the world of video video games, 2K confirmed final summer season 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 venture’s launch, former Gears of Battle head and Diablo franchise lead Rod Fergusson will now oversee the venture. Fergusson will even head up the sport’s improvement studio Cloud Chamber, because it makes an attempt to lastly wrestle the venture to launch.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s Information Editor. You may attain Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or discover him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social