Excited for the BioShock movie? You might want to sit down, as director Francis Lawrence's schedule is busy
Netflix should start looking for someone else.
You might not remember it, but in early 2022, Netflix and 2K jointly announced the BioShock movie was back from the dead and in active development. Later that year, we learned that Francis Lawrence (of I Am Legend and The Hunger Games fame) would be directing. Now, that's looking more and more unlikely.
Up until recently, Lawrence has been openly chatting about the project and what his hopes and goals for it are, yet we're not convinced he'll be the filmmaker to journey down to Rapture once we look at his increasingly packed schedule. We do hope that notable scribe Michael Green (Logan, Blade Runner 2049) stays on board though.
Via Deadline, we've learned that production on the long-in-development big-screen adaptation of Stephen King's The Long Walk has finally started shooting with Lawrence in the director's chair. After that, he's supposedly sticking around in Panem for the next Hunger Games prequel, which would become the fifth installment in the long-running franchise he's handled. In fact, only the first Hunger Games was directed by someone else.
Such projects alone greatly lower the chances of Netflix's BioShock happening with him at the helm anytime soon, but that's not all. There are two late sequels to past works of his currently brewing as well: I Am Legend 2, which will for some weird reason continue from the alternate ending that wasn't in the original's final cut, and Constantine 2, starring Keanu Reeves if it does move forward. Mind you, these two sequels could fall through at any moment, yet they seem far more personal projects for Lawrence than making BioShock as a gun-for-hire.
BioShock isn't the only game-to-movie/TV project currently plodding along at Netflix. While the streaming giant's output of video game adaptations is pretty abundant, big bets like Gears of War and Horizon Zero Dawn are having trouble one way or another. Meanwhile, HBO's The Last of Us and Prime Video's Fallout are leading the pack and signaling that maybe big-budget shows are the way to go when adapting the vastness of most video game worlds and stories.