‘Bioshock’ Film Adaptation Still in the Works With Scaled Down Budget; It’s a ‘More Personal’ Movie, Says Producer Roy Lee

Netflix’s film adaptation of the seminal video game “Bioshock” with director Francis Lawrence is being “reconfigured” to be a “more personal” film with a reduced budget, producer Roy Lee (“The Lego Movie”) revealed on Thursday during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con.

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The adaptation was first announced Feb. 2022 as a partnership between Netflix and the game’s producers 2K and Take-Two Interactive. The first “Bioshock” game, released in 2007, is set in a vast underwater city called Rapture created in the desire to foster a utopia, but instead has fallen into chaos and violence. The game’s twist-filled narrative and vibrant philosophical worldview captured gamers imaginations; sequels followed in 2010 and 2013, and the series has sold more than 39 million copies worldwide.

Since that announcement, however, Dan Lin replaced Scott Stuber as Netflix’s film chief, and Lin has refocused the streamer’s movie strategy to a more relatively modest approach from Stuber’s mandate of expansive spending on a prolific film slate.

“The new regime has lowered the budgets,” Lee said. “So we’re doing a much smaller version. … It’s going to be a more personal point of view, as opposed to a grander, big project.” Lawrence is still attached to direct.

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Lee was participating in Collider’s Producers on Producers panel, joined by Lorenzo di Bonaventura (“Transformers,” “Deepwater Horizon”) and Akiva Goldsman (“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” “I Am Legend”) and moderator Steven Weintraub. Lee also said that Netflix has shifted its compensation strategy to a more traditional model of bonuses tied to viewership numbers, rather than buyouts of prospective backend profits. He said he’d just received a new contract for a new project with the streamer

“They’re changing it to be a metric similar to box office bonuses,” he said. “It’s a chart: It’s this amount of viewers, you get this amount of compensation in terms of increased back end. It motivates the producers to actually do a movie that gets a bigger audience.”

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