Producer Roy Lee revealed on Thursday that Netflix is still in development on a Bioshock movie and the project should move forward with The Hunger Games franchise’s Francis Lawrence directing, even if the pic winds up being a bit smaller in scope than originally envisioned.
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Speaking at Collider’s Producers on Producers panel, also featuring Akiva Goldsman and Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Lee noted that the project entered development at Netflix at a time when the streamer was under a different film regime. This was the era of film chief Scott Stuber, who announced his departure from Netflix in January, with Dan Lin eventually coming in to take over his role, shifting the streamer away from producing an abundance of huge tentpole projects, in favor of more modestly budgeted efforts.
“The new regime has lowered the budgets,” said Lee. “So we’re doing a much smaller version… It’s going to be a more personal point of view, as opposed to a grander, more epic project.”
A critically acclaimed video game series developed by Irrational Games and published by 2K Games, Bioshock kicked off with a 2007 game of the same name, which was followed by sequels Bioshock 2 and Bioshock Infinite in 2010 and 2013, respectively. While each of the games examines the downfall of utopian societies due to extreme ideologies and scientific overreach, the original takes place in the underwater city of Rapture, a failed utopia riddled with political and social decay, where the player must navigate through its haunting Art Deco corridors, battling genetically modified enemies. To date, the games have sold upwards of 39 million copies worldwide.
Netflix’s film adaptation of Bioshock was first announced in 2022, with 2K Games and Take-Two Interactive coming together to produce.
During today’s panel, Lee also discussed the many years he spent courting bestselling author Stephen King, in order to be able to produce a feature adaptation of his 1979 book The Long Walk , written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
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“Stephen King is one of my favorite authors, and I had been chasing The Long Walk for over 20 years. I would just send him letters, and talk to his assistant, and always got a no for 20 years,” said Lee, who got his break into King’s work in his work on the It films for New Line.
“After It ,” Lee recounted, “he finally said anything he had that was available, I could do, and unfortunately The Long Walk was with Frank Darabont and various other directors and producers [over the years]. It was only a year ago that the rights became available, and I just flew yesterday from the set. We just started the first week of production.”
As we first reported earlier today, Judy Greer and Mark Hamill have just joined the cast for the Lionsgate film, led by Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson. Others in the mix include Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Jordan Gonzalez, Joshua Odjick and Roman Griffin Davis. The Hunger Games ‘ Lawrence is directing the pic from a script by JT Mollner.
This year’s edition of San Diego Comic-Con runs through Sunday, July 28.
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