The lovely folks over at Eurogamer recently spoke to Ken Levine, the creative director of the critically-acclaimed Bioshock gaming series - the latest of which, Bioshock Infinite, is just about to come out - and the topic of the now-cancelled Bioshock movie came up.
It turns out that the Irrational Games creative head was personally responsible for canning the project, citing the limited success of Zack Snyder's adaptation of cult graphic novel **Watchmen **as the main reason why the hard R big screen take on the gaming franchise never came to pass.
"There was a deal in place, and it was in production at Universal - Gore Verbinski was directing it," he told Eurogamer. "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."
"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 a $80 million film - and Gore didn't want to make a $80 million film.
"They brought another director in, and I didn't really see the match there - and 2K's one of these companies that puts a lot of creative trust in people. So they said if you want to kill it, kill it. And I killed it."
So that, as they say, was that. There are currently no plans to reboot the project, but gamers can look forward to an Assassin's Creed **movie and a Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon** movie (both via Ubisoft). Then there's the on-going Resident Evil franchise, which is set to have a sixth instalment very soon...
Bioshock Infinite is out on March 26. To be in with a chance of winning a copy (and a lot more), check out our competition for it here...