Vari­ety have con­firmed many Hol­ly­wood mur­mur­ings that a BioShock movie is, now offi­cially, in the works. Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios have picked up the video game adap­ta­tion with Gore Verbin­ski (Pirates of the Caribbean) set to direct. It is also thought that Last Samu­rai and Avi­a­tor screen­writer, John Logan, is cur­rently in talks.

The agree­ment between movie and game stu­dios has been struc­tured to avoid the col­lapse that the Halo movie adap­ta­tion fell to,

Take-Two exec­u­tive chair­man Strauss Zel­nick said the “state of the art” deal is struc­tured so that “Bioshock” won’t end up in turn­around like “Halo,” which is back with Microsoft.

“The rea­son I struc­tured it the way I did is to make sure it gets made,” he emphasized.

The arti­cle then pro­vides some back­ground to the agree­ment whilst imply­ing that the cre­ative minds involved hope to stay true to the game.

Take-Two has been approached by a num­ber of pro­duc­ers and stu­dios since the game came out in August but waited until it had swept most of the end-of-year indus­try awards and racked up impres­sive hol­i­day sales before work­ing with CAA to pack­age the project. Uni­ver­sal got a first look and made a pre­emp­tive bid.

[…]

“One of the things we decided early on is that we didn’t want to go through a pro­ducer,” he com­mented. “It’s ter­ri­bly impor­tant to us to have a mean­ing­ful influ­ence on how this project is pro­duced. We didn’t want any insu­la­tion between us.”

Verbin­ski noted that Rapture’s art deco design and visu­ally arrest­ing char­ac­ters, such as the mechan­i­cal Big Dad­dys who pro­tect genet­i­cally mutated girls called Lit­tle Sis­ters, par­tic­u­larly inspired him to see the game as a film.

Though no release date is even being tar­geted, Verbin­ski said he plans to start pre-production as soon as Logan’s script is fin­ished and approved by all involved.

Helmer has been reg­u­larly con­sult­ing with Ken Levine, the game’s cre­ative direc­tor, though it’s not yet clear if the game devel­oper will have a for­mal role in the film.

All in all, the signs look very good for an excit­ing and faith­ful video game adap­ta­tion, espe­cially with the tal­ents of Verbin­ski and Logan on board.