Back in February 2022, Netflix announced it was working on producing an original film adaptation of the hit video game series, BioShock. The film was slated to be a massive project with scale and a ‘sense of grander’ it has since seen a budget cut as a result of new management in Netflix with the arrival of Dan Lin as film chief for the streaming company. Producer Roy Lee, best known for his work with The Lego Movie, stated in a Comic-Con panel that the BioShock movie is still in production but is being ‘reconfigured into a more personal story’. Francis Lawerance is still the director and helming the project to the end with this new direction from Netflix.

Lin came in after Scott Stuber and switched his predecessor’s style of spending by focusing on views for movies instead of larger budgets for prolific titles. Lin scaled back the budgets as an incentive for filmmakers to switch to making more appealing movies on the whole for audiences by offering larger profits for the back end for reaching a certain number of views instead of relying on buyouts of the films.

The BioShock games were released between 2007 to 2013 with three titles and were developed by 2K and Take-Two Interactive which are working with Netflix and Lawerance to produce the Bioshock movie. The Bioshock game follows the stories of the people living in an underwater city, ‘Rapture’ a place meant to be a utopia turned into a violent hotbed of crime. The deep world-building and philosophical narratives captured gamers’ hearts, seeing BioShock sell 39 million copies worldwide.