8 HUGE Movies That Were Cancelled Just Before Shooting

Based on the immensely popular game of the same name, a Bioshock movie was set to come crashing into existence in 2010 - but the project was drowned just weeks before director Gore Verbinski could get his work on screen. Being fair, creating the underwater city of Rapture would have been no small feat, with the art deco stylings of the ocean floor homestead one of the fundamental parts of gameplay, and monsters like big daddies and little sisters harder yet to capture in reality. It's the sort of explosively hot property that fans want right or not at all, leading to a number of expensive decisions that signed the film's own death sentence.

The prospect of proper Bioshock jumped the price tag up to an eye-watering $160 million, an amount that studio Universal weren't willing to shell out after Watchmen's comparable failure to recoup its budget, especially since this would be another R rated outing. The film changed hands from Verbinski to Carlos Fresnadillo, but his vision for the film's universe didn't sit well with game creator Ken Levine in the end, resulting in him pulling out of production to bide his time for the right filmmaker.

Hopefully, it'll surface again one day.