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.
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.
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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.
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.”
