Would you kindly? Francis Lawrence says Netflix’s BioShock film is still alive, despite the “regime changes” (film news).

Netflix’s BioShock film has spent so long at the bottom of the ocean that you could be forgiven for thinking it had been spliced into something unrecognisable. Not so, says its director. Francis Lawrence has told The Direct that the adaptation is very much alive, if not yet kicking. “We are still working on it,” he said, adding: “I would love nothing more than to be able to make that movie.” He did concede that Netflix’s “regime changes” have complicated things, which is a diplomatic way of saying the people who greenlit it are not necessarily the people now deciding whether to pay for it.

Netflix announced the film with 2K and Take-Two back in 2022, with Roy Lee’s Vertigo Entertainment producing and, most recently, Michael Green and Justin Rhodes on script duties. Lawrence had hoped to make it his next film after The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, according to Dark Horizons. He has since been handed Red Rising by Paramount, so his diary is not exactly empty.

For anyone who missed it in 2007, Irrational Games’ original is set in Rapture, an art-deco city built on the floor of the Atlantic by the industrialist Andrew Ryan as a refuge from governments, churches and anyone else who might tell a great man what to do. By the time you arrive, his objectivist paradise has collapsed into civil war, fuelled by gene-altering plasmids and patrolled by lumbering Big Daddies who escort eerie Little Sisters around the wreckage. It’s Ayn Rand by way of H.G. Wells, and its central twist, built around the phrase “would you kindly”, remains one of the best tricks a game has ever played on its own player.

That twist is also the adaptation’s biggest problem. A game can make you complicit in a way a film audience never is, and the reveal works precisely because you were the one holding the controller. Lawrence, whose credits include I Am Legend and four Hunger Games films, knows his way around a collapsed society, but nobody in a cinema seat has been obeying orders for the past ten hours. Still, with The Last of Us and Fallout proving that game adaptations no longer have to be dreadful, there is a good film to be made in Rapture. Whether Netflix will kindly pay for it is another matter.