Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski has said that his scrapped BioShock film adaptation would have somehow included both of the original game’s endings to mess with the audience’s heads.
Verbinski was attached to make a movie version of the beloved game back in 2008 alongside Universal Studios, with a script in place from Gladiator and Skyfall scribe John Logan.
Alas, the project never materialized due to lengthy wrangling over its planned $200 million budget — deemed risky due to it also aiming for an adults-only R rating. Verbinski has previously said the movie came within eight weeks of shooting, before plans faltered. Work continued to try and get the film financed for several more years, though BioShock creator Ken Levine confirmed the project had been fully cancelled by 2013.
“I loved this project when we were getting close to making it at Universal,” Verbinski has said now, discussing the project in a reddit Q&A. “I was going to dive deeply into the Oedipal aspect and definitely keep it hard R with the Little Sisters, and the ‘choices’ the protagonist makes… and the consequences.
“I had worked out a way with writer John Logan to have both endings and I was looking forward to bringing that to the big screen and really f***ing with people’s heads,” he continued. “[We] had some great designs for the Big Daddies and the entire underwater demented art-deco aesthetic. Every year I hear something about the project, but I’m not sure any studio is quite willing to go where I was headed.”
The original BioShock has two endings, based on the player’s choices to either rescue or sacrifice the game’s Little Sisters — and the two very different outcomes you get based on your level of mercy. The game’s ‘happy’ ending — seen if you rescue every Little Sister — rewards the hero with a long life and the surviving sisters present on his eventual deathbed. However, if you harvest any Little Sister, your character is shown instead having influenced Rapture’s citizens to believe that power is all that matters. An ominous final cutscene then shows what looks to be a nuclear submarine being taken over in an attack.
Concept Art Offers a Glimpse at the BioShock Movie That Could’ve Been
The two endings are pretty different, then — a long and happy life or potential nuclear apocalypse — and it’s unclear exactly how Verbinski’s movie would have shown both. Could one have been a dream sequence, showing what might have been the alternative outcome? Or would the movie have presented audiences with two possible futures, and left viewers unclear as to which actually played out?
The later BioShock Infinite played on the multiverse theory (“there’s always a lighthouse”!) but it’s worth pointing out that this was still years away at the point of Verbinski being involved. Still, it’s fun to ponder how an adaptation might treat the game’s two endings now. Especially as plans to adapt BioShock have since resumed — with Netflix now involved in a potential adaptation.
Netflix announced plans for a fresh adaptation back in 2022, though recent years have seen the project stall again, as cuts changed the scope of the movie, necessitating changes to its script. In September 2025, producer Roy Lee confirmed the project is still in active development, with director Francis Lawrence on board to direct after finishing his work on the forthcoming The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.
“It’s a tricky adaptation, so there’s lots of things to figure out and to get right,” Lawrence told IGN previously. “There’s regime changes at Netflix, and so things stall out and get re-energized and stall out and get re-energized, and I think we’re in a pretty good place, honestly.”
Back in the world of video games, 2K confirmed last summer that it had overhauled the similarly long-awaited BioShock 4, which has been in development for the last decade. Amid layoffs and a further delay to the project’s release, former Gears of War head and Diablo franchise lead Rod Fergusson will now oversee the project. Fergusson will also head up the game’s development studio Cloud Chamber, as it attempts to finally wrestle the project to release.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
