Who Watched the Watchmen Kill the BioShock Movie?

Steve Barton   |  

Mar 13, 2013

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Here we are the week before the release of BioShock Infinite, and once again some slight chatter about the long proposed BioShock feature film has arisen. However, there’s no good news here. In fact it’s just an explanation of the bad.

EuroGamer recently caught up with Irrational’s Ken Levine at BAFTA, where he was on hand to promote BioShock Infinite. He also went on to explain that it was he who killed the movie version.

“There was a deal in place, and it was in production at Universal – Gore Verbinski was directing it,” said Levine. “My theory is that Gore wanted to make a hard R film – which is like a 17/18 plus, where you can have blood and naked girls. Well, I don’t think he wanted naked girls. But he wanted a lot of blood.” He continues, “Then Watchmen came out, and it didn’t do well for whatever reason. The studio then got cold feet about making an R-rated $200 million film, and they said what if it was an $80 million film – and Gore didn’t want to make an $80 million film.”

This caused Universal to bring in a new director, which made Levine uncomfortable: “So they said if you want to kill it, kill it. And I killed it.”

Good for you, Ken! Way to stand your ground!

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