Take-Two has signed a deal with Universal and Pirates of the Caribbean helmer, Gore Verbinski and Aviator screenwriter John Logan to produce the movie version of 2007’s popular video game Bioshock. This is said to be the biggest game to movie deal since the ill fated movie version of Halo. We all know how the deal with Microsft to produce a Halo game fell through which still made the software giant some money, well $5 million in fact. However; Strauss Zelnick the chairman from Take-Two has structured the deal a little different for Bioshock, he said “the state of the art deal is structured so that “Bioshock” won’t end up in turnaround like “Halo,” which is back with Microsoft.” He emphasized “The reason I structured it the way I did is to make sure it gets made.”
Take-Two has not been short of offers to turn Bioshock into a movie, but the game developer wanted to wait until it had one countless awards in the game industry, so that they could be offered a better deal from a movie studio. Universal was very impressed with the games results that they decided to make a preemptive bid.
No release date for Bioshock has been targeted yet as the movie is in the very early stages however Verbinski will be starting start pre-production as soon as Logan has finished and approved the script.
Take-Two has been approached by a number of producers and studios since the game came out in August but waited until it had swept most of the end-of-year industry awards and racked up impressive holiday sales before working with CAA to package the project. Universal got a first look and made a pre-emptive bid.
It will be great to see how Bioshock will work as a movie; the game is set in an alternative history 1960, and is in an underwater world. The scenes will be very dark and I would be interested to know what film certificate it would be.
