A short while back we thought we had the green light on BioShock’s pro­duc­tion — Gore Verbin­ski was dis­card­ing the Pirates 4 project and every­thing looked set to go. Shortly after Uni­ver­sal put the project on hold because of spi­ral­ing bud­gets of +£160m.

Now Verbin­ski tells the LA Times:

The bot­tom line is [BioShock] has to shoot out of the States for bud­get rea­sons and my sched­ule may be pro­hib­i­tive. There’s a great script and a really inter­est­ing cast. It really comes down to the finan­cial model now. Big movies are just not being shot in the States. I’m weigh­ing whether I can phys­i­cally go the U.K. or Aus­tralia or one of those other places with a tax rebate for a year-and-a-half.

It’s now highly ques­tion­able that Gore Verbin­ski will even­tu­ally helm the BioShock adaptation.

Just a cou­ple of weeks after we heard the encour­ag­ing Gore Verbin­ski news we receive a bomb-shell from Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios. It appears that the bud­get for the under­wa­ter fea­ture has been spi­ral­ing out of con­trol, reach­ing val­ues around $160m, and in a move to cut costs (to say $100m) a num­ber of pro­duc­tion staff have been let go. Other mea­sures include scout­ing for cheaper film­ing loca­tions, e.g. London.

Verbin­ski states,

“We were asked by Uni­ver­sal to move the film out­side the U.S. to take advan­tage of a tax credit. […] We are eval­u­at­ing whether this is some­thing we want to do. In the mean­time, the film is in a hold­ing pattern.”

Both the game and movie stu­dios vow that this will not descend into another Halo movie fiasco which has seen pro­duc­tion indef­i­nitely halted.

It was pre­vi­ously rumored that Verbin­ski would be helm­ing the project, but here is the big news we’ve been wait­ing for — he has given up his direct­ing chair on Pirates of the Caribbean 4 to take on the BioShock project — Gore Verbin­ski shall be helm­ing the video game adap­ta­tion. Verbin­ski directed all three Pirates of the Caribbean movies as well as the US Ring remake.

A year since the announce­ment that a movie would be made it looks like the ball might soon be rolling into the realms of pre-production.

Vari­ety have con­firmed many Hol­ly­wood mur­mur­ings that a BioShock movie is, now offi­cially, in the works. Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios have picked up the video game adap­ta­tion with Gore Verbin­ski (Pirates of the Caribbean) set to direct. It is also thought that Last Samu­rai and Avi­a­tor screen­writer, John Logan, is cur­rently in talks.

The agree­ment between movie and game stu­dios has been struc­tured to avoid the col­lapse that the Halo movie adap­ta­tion fell to,

Take-Two exec­u­tive chair­man Strauss Zel­nick said the “state of the art” deal is struc­tured so that “Bioshock” won’t end up in turn­around like “Halo,” which is back with Microsoft.

“The rea­son I struc­tured it the way I did is to make sure it gets made,” he emphasized.

The arti­cle then pro­vides some back­ground to the agree­ment whilst imply­ing that the cre­ative minds involved hope to stay true to the game.

Take-Two has been approached by a num­ber of pro­duc­ers and stu­dios since the game came out in August but waited until it had swept most of the end-of-year indus­try awards and racked up impres­sive hol­i­day sales before work­ing with CAA to pack­age the project. Uni­ver­sal got a first look and made a pre­emp­tive bid.

[…]

“One of the things we decided early on is that we didn’t want to go through a pro­ducer,” he com­mented. “It’s ter­ri­bly impor­tant to us to have a mean­ing­ful influ­ence on how this project is pro­duced. We didn’t want any insu­la­tion between us.”

Verbin­ski noted that Rapture’s art deco design and visu­ally arrest­ing char­ac­ters, such as the mechan­i­cal Big Dad­dys who pro­tect genet­i­cally mutated girls called Lit­tle Sis­ters, par­tic­u­larly inspired him to see the game as a film.

Though no release date is even being tar­geted, Verbin­ski said he plans to start pre-production as soon as Logan’s script is fin­ished and approved by all involved.

Helmer has been reg­u­larly con­sult­ing with Ken Levine, the game’s cre­ative direc­tor, though it’s not yet clear if the game devel­oper will have a for­mal role in the film.

All in all, the signs look very good for an excit­ing and faith­ful video game adap­ta­tion, espe­cially with the tal­ents of Verbin­ski and Logan on board.