Sony Registers BIOSHOCK Movie Domains

Could a live-action Bioshock movie be in the works...again? Kotaku reports, Sony Pictures has registered three curious domain names: bioshock-movie.com, bioshock-movie.net and bio-shock.net. At this time, there is no content available on these pages. Even if a Sony-produced BioShock films is only in the early stages of being developed it seems logical that the studio would want to lock down potentially lucrative domain names. Universal was the last studio to try and adapt BioShock to film. In 2008, Universal started developing a live-action film for the popular video game series, BioShock. Gore Verbinski ("The Lone Ranger") was set to direct a script written by John Logan ("The Last Samurai"). A year later, the R-rated Watchmen struggled at the box office. That lead Universal to feel uneasy about producing a $200 million R-rated BioShock. They requested Gore try to make his vision for around $80 million to help mitigate their risk exposure. Gore balked at the request. He then slid over into the producer's chair, and director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo ("28 Weeks Late") replaced him at the helm. Early 2010, pre-production had begun, but not long afterward BioShock creator Ken Levine stepped in and pulled the plug for good. Levine felt as though Juan Carlos Fresnadillo was not a good match for BioShock, nor was Levine willing to make other compromises just to see his game come to life on the big screen. Last year, Levine mentioned that he will attempt to write a BioShock screenplay after he completed BioShock Infinite. Perhaps, he did.

In the first half of the 20th century an industrialist by the name of Andrew Ryan, built an underwater utopia called Rapture. Rapture was populated by the world's best and the brightest and was seen as an unbridled success. A undetermined period of time later a new species of sea slug that secreted stem cells was discovered in the ocean surrounding Rapture. This allowed the inhabitants of Rapture to enhance physical and mental capabilities and to heal old wounds. These stem cells, known as Adam, became so sought after that a war to control the substance broke out between Andrew Ryan and one of Adam's original discoverers, a scientist named Fontaine. The war was eventually won by Ryan, however the population, having modified themselves to survive the war, was changed forever. They were now addicted to Adam and depended on it for their survival. The game starts as the player's aeroplane crash lands in the ocean near Rapture ten years after society collapsed. - bioshock-online.com