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R-Rating Sunk BioShock Movie Plans
Back in 2008, it was announced that BioShock would be getting a movie adaptation. Those plans never really materialized, and director Gore Verbinski has now explained why:
"I couldn't really get past anybody that would spend the money that it would take to do it and keep an R rating. Alternately, I wasn't really interested in pursuing a PG-13 version. Because the R rating is inherent. Little Sisters and injections and the whole thing. I just wanted to really, really make it a movie where, four days later, you're still shivering and going, 'Jesus Christ!' It's a movie that has to be really, really scary, but you also have to create a whole underwater world, so the price tag is high. We just didn't have any takers on an R-rated movie with that price tag."
How about we each give the guy $10 and proceed to pirate the movie off tpb when it's done? Wouldn't it be just?
If the filmmaker only would've started his sentence with "would you kindly", he would've got unconditional support for making the movie
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Why the fuck would it matter? Bioshock's rated M, or 18+, or any other multitude of Adult Only, depending on region. When the game did so well with the rating, why wouldn't anyone think a film would? Wait, it's members of the MPAA we're discussing here. Not exactly the sharpest tacks, yeah?
Sure, if you could get 3~5 million other like-minded people to fork over 10 bucks, sight unseen, with no guarantee that the movie would be any good, or even completed within a couple year's time. ($50M production cost seems like a good ballpark for a movie of this type.) And you'd pretty much have to put up this money all at once. Big movies can't be made piecemeal, assembling actors and technicians, negotiating with unions, renting out sets... these are complicated tasks.
Maybe you'd have an easier time finding fewer people willing to contribute more money upfront. Maybe some of them want contracts stipulating when the movie must be delivered. Maybe you'd get more donations if you promise that, should the movie make a profit somehow, that it would be shared amongst everyone. Perhaps some of the investors may feel that the movie would have a better chance of returning a profit if it had a marketing budget, and reach the widest number of viewers possible.
Hello, new corporate movie studio.
How about we each pledge money for a possible share in the profits? If it doesn't reach $50m or $75m or whatever it takes to do the film justice, no-one pays and it doesn't get made. If it gets made and doesn't make a profit, we don't get the money but we do get a kick-ass Bioshock movie and the knowledge we contributed. Crowd-sourced movie funding on a massive scale.
If 500,000 people pledged $200 each or 1,000,000 people pledged $100, it would have a budget of $100m, which is 6 times the budget of Brazil, twice the budget of The One which had Jet Li in it, fighting copies of himself, more than twice the budget of Sin City and only half of what James Cameron needed for Titanic/Avatar.
I would be in the front of the queue.
OK, having now read the fine article, the budget that the studio asked to be cut, was $160m, but the point stands.1,600,000 donating $100 or 800,000 donating $200.
(Incidentally, $10 is silly money because it would take 16 million people to get the movie made, which is doubtful, and to get people to donate more than that, they need more inducement than "you can have a free copy of the movie". )
It doesn't have to be memorable. It has to be profitable.
Uwe Boll!
Uwe Boll!
Uwe Boll!
(at very least, they could've adopted his tactics to get funding)
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Cool, will put you down for that. I'm going to start a website on geocities and get this ball rolling. Anyone know HTML?
your buggy captchas suck, i wont even try to re-post.
And nothing of value was lost.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Why not copy what The Tunnel movie did and have people pay $1 per frame. They also randomly choose a frame, and the owner of that frame gets %1 of any money they make.
Certainly a fun way to get involved in a movie creation.
Would it be possible to donate cycles from individual PCs to help render scenes, similar to the SETI project ? That would cut costs dramatically.
LotR is a book?? I always thought it was a radio drama by BBC.
- Raynet --> .
No, it started as a series of sketches performed by the Cambridge Footlights, then that was made into the radio drama. That was then novelised by an enterprising young pornographer of some disrepute. (This pulp novelisation was later serialised on television by Michael Winner and Ken Russell but almost no-one ever acknowledges this). Anyway, it was only made into a book when the original sketches' notes were found and interpreted by the Red Baron, (using Alan Turing and other captured code-breakers from Bletchley Park), who believed them to be the D-Day invasion plans. Turing's recollections of this experience to Tolkien then went on to form the basis for the outline of the canonical version of the LotR books. They languished in obscurity for 50 years before eventually, a young man named Peter Jackson stumbled upon a copy of them in his grand-father's attic while investigating a sort of a musty, damp smell. But don't you try and tell that to the wikipedia editors. Bastards.
You're wrong, and also right. Fake blood, gross effects and nudity don't make a movie scary, but you can call all these nonsense PG-13 "horror" movies that Hollywood has pumped out lately even remotely scary. It can't be scary and still be suitable for a 13 year old. Hollywood hasn't made a scary movie in decades.
Good for this guy. Better to make nothing at all than release a watered-down piece of shit just to get a PG-13 rating and make the studios happy. All that would do is ruin the reputation of the Bioshock name.
I wish other people in the movie business had the same level of integrity as this guy. I have seen too many adult-themed movies get released that are butchered because they had to go for a PG-13 rating. I wouldn't waste my time watching that tripe even if it didn't cost me any money.
As others have mentioned, this guy should really set up a PayPal account and produce the movie independently. I would gladly donate money for such a project so long as I was promised that the content of the movie would remain as graphic as necessary to properly maintain the themes of the Bioshock story.
is anyone surprised? you have to murder little girls for their spirit energy or whatever. the base concept is a little fucked up.
Actually this is essentially how Kickstarter fundraising works, but admittedly on a much larger scale. The budget for the project a deadline for the money to be raised are set and anyyone can pledge money, but no one is actually charged unless the funding goal is reached. If it is, everyone's money is automatically debited; if not, the project has failed to meet its target and none of the backers lose out.
Now, this presupposes that merely raising the $50m will actually guarantee the film gets made - which it doesn't - but with a large number of small backers, the risk to each is limited. And when it's made they all get a free digital version of the finished product. The only guarantee of quality is whatever pre-production artwork and other information can be used to entice people to contribute.
Obviously backers that way are not traditional investors and don't get a share in profits. Instead they have rewards based on their contribution. $30 might get a DVD version of the completed film, $50 the blu-ray, $100 signed artwork, $1000 some set piece memorabilia, etc.
Do I think you can actually, workably scale this kind of idea up to the level of Hollywood film production? Probably not, but it's not entirely ridiculous either.
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Great Cthulhu..."
You don't have to, that's the point. There's a moral choice, kill the girls and be rewarded immediately with more "ADAM", or save the girls and be rewarded with less ADAM now, but a clean conscience and a happier ending/easier Big Bad fight at the climax when the little girls come to help you. The "base concept" is a little fucked up, not because it condones child murder, but because it explores/critiques moral objectivism by taking them all the way to some pretty out-there conclusions.