PIRATES director halts production on $160 million BIOSHOCK!

Even when you have delivered over a billion dollars to a rival studio with one of the most profitable film franchises of all time, there still comes a limit with how much your new studio will trust you with cash and there has to come a point when too much, is simply too much, especially in these poor economic times. Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean)'s movie Bioshock, his adaptation of the weird and wonderful Take Two Interactive video game has just officially begun to cost too much. A sudden budget rise has seen the Universal picture creep up to $160 million, a figure higher than Star Trek and Watchmen and the film is described as being in a "holding pattern" According to Variety, this has meant the studio have been forced to cut costs, letting several pre-production staff leave and are currently mulling over whether to move the production to London instead of Los Angeles, where they can take advantage of tax credit. The situation reminds me a lot of what happened when Halo was gearing up to production at the same studio. Indeed the similarities are obvious. They are both mega popular Xbox 360 games, both with a relatively new and large fanbase but one untested outside of the video game universe and both would make killer movies, and cost a fortune to make. They are both also subject to two of the highest Hollywood rights deals in video game history and it would be a travesty if Bioshock went the way of Halo. Verbinski wants to make this movie so bad, he left a very profitable job at Disney with the Pirates franchise to make this movie, to tell this story. Let's hope they can gets those costs down so we can see it and from what I've heard, John Logan's (Sweeney Todd, The Aviator) script is dynamite.