Famous and award-winning film director Guillermo del Toro is a fan of video games. He even tried, for a few years, to make a game called Insane. It didn’t work out, and he has no plans to try again. But what about adapting a game into a movie? Well turns out he’s tried doing that too, but when he talked to the people behind BioShock, it went horribly.
In a new interview with IGN, del Toro was asked if he was open to the idea of making a film based on a game. And surprisingly, del Toro not only revealed he has tried, but even claimed he had attempted to make a BioShock movie at some point. However, movies are so different than games that it seems like the phone calls he has had with game studios and publishers haven’t gone well.
“You know, I tried. We had a very contentious call about a couple of games,” said del Toro.
“I I find that the dynamics of a video game are very different than a movie, right? They may be cinematically similar in terms of the camera moving, and this and that, but the storytelling is very different because you’re not solving puzzles. You’re not assembling. When we made the structure for [my never completed game] Insane, we created what I call a mandala; you have to give the illusion of an infinite sandbox, and you lead audiences to the right or to the left through their own decisions, quote unquote, but you sort of have to corner them.”
“So it’s a very different thing,” explained del Toro to IGN. “So adapting it… You know, BioShock, we had a couple of calls. They are two of-probably one of the most disastrous calls I’ve ever had. Uh…so no, I’m fucking done.”
As for games he likes, the Hellboy director explained that he loves Left 4 Dead, Death Stranding, and Shadow of the Colossus, which made him think hard about “so many untangible things.” He is also a fan of Dead Cells, though he admits he hates respawning over and over. And he praised BioShock as a game with a world “I could get lost in for ages.”
But del Toro revealed, with a laugh, the game he plays the most: Angry Birds.
“Every day in my life, every moment I have free, I’m still playing Angry Birds,” admitted del Toro. “I’m really good at it. I’m really good at it.”
As for the BioShock movie, it’s still apparently happening after being in some form of development since 2010. In 2022, 2K announced it would be made for Netflix. Then in 2024, the film’s producer claimed that it was still happening at Netflix, but the budget had been slashed.
“So we’re doing a much smaller version,” producer Roy Lee said at Comic-Con in 2024. “It’s going to be a more personal point of view, as opposed to a grander, big project.”
