Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has one of the most interesting catalogs of unmade projects in the entire industry. For every award-winning endeavor like last year’s Frankenstein, the director has an ill-fated counterpart like his abandoned At the Mountains of Madness adaptation.
In fact, it seems like every few years we hear about an amazing del Toro project that never made it past pre-production, with the latest of these being his long-rumored involvement with an unmade BioShock film – involvement which the filmmaker has finally confirmed.
In a recent interview with IGN, del Toro was asked if he’s interested in adapting video games to the big screen. The director responded that he’d already tried, and then revealed that one of those games was 2K Games’ 2007 opus BioShock.
According to del Toro: “We had a very contentious call about a couple of games. I find that the dynamics of a video game are very different than a movie. They may be cinematically similar in terms of the camera moving, and this and that, but the storytelling is very different, because you’re not solving puzzles. You’re not assembling.“
The filmmaker then went on to clarify his position on any future attempts at game adaptations: “So adapting it, BioShock, we had a couple of calls. They are probably one of the most disastrous calls I’ve ever had. So no, f**k no.”
While we’ll likely never know exactly what made the BioShock negotiations so bad that they turned del Toro off from video game adaptations for good, the filmmaker’s relationship with the industry had already been soured after his ambitious plans for Insane (a planned trilogy of cinematic survival horror titles) fell through all the way back in 2012.
That’s not even mentioning the canceling of PT/Silent Hills, which del Toro was set to collaborate on alongside gaming auteur Hideo Kojima, in 2015.
Guillermo del Toro’s dark fantasy masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth, re-releases in theaters on October 9 for its 20th anniversary.
