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Guillermo del Toro and video games just can’t seem to make it work. The filmmaker has crossed paths with gaming several times over the years, only to watch projects collapse before they could reach players or movie audiences.
After a particularly ugly experience trying to crack a BioShock movie, he’s pretty much closed the door on adapting a video game for the big screen.
Del Toro once explored making a film based on BioShock, the acclaimed game series known for its twisted underwater world, creepy atmosphere, and some seriously cinematic storytelling. Whatever happened during his experience with that apparently went badly enough to kill his interest in the entire idea.
There are plenty of video games that seem made for Guillermo del Toro. Silent Hill is an obvious one, with its nightmarish creatures, decaying environments, and horror imagery. Del Toro even worked with Hideo Kojima on the canceled Silent Hills.
Fans hoping to see him take on a video game movie shouldn’t get their hopes up. When IGN asked if he would ever adapt a video game into a movie, del Toro answered “never,” before making his position even clearer: “No, f**k no.”
His problem isn’t with video game movies in general. He actually tried to make one himself, and the project was BioShock.
Opening up about the experience, Guillermo del Toro said he participated in a couple of business calls, though he didn’t reveal who was involved, which were, “probably one [sic] of the most disastrous calls I’ve ever had.”
The experience appears to have reinforced something del Toro already understood from working in both mediums. Games and movies might share visual language, but telling a story through them requires very different tools.
“I find that the dynamics of a video game are very different than a movie. 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 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,’ but you sort of have to corner them.”
Back in 2010, the filmmaker announced InSane, an ambitious survival horror game planned as the first entry in a trilogy. The concept was designed to make players feel like they were exploring an enormous sandbox while the game gradually steered them back toward its central story. It never got there.
InSane was canceled in 2012, and publisher THQ went bankrupt a few months later. The rights eventually reverted to del Toro, meaning the filmmaker could potentially recycle its monsters, ideas, or story elements for another project someday.
If he turned them into a movie, technically he still wouldn’t be making a video game adaptation since InSane never actually became a released game.
His bad luck with gaming didn’t end there, either. Del Toro later collaborated with Hideo Kojima and Norman Reedus on Silent Hills, which produced the legendary playable teaser P.T. before Konami canceled the game.
BioShock has been especially difficult to translate into a movie. Gore Verbinski was previously attached to direct an adaptation, but the project fell apart when he couldn’t secure the budget he believed was necessary while also keeping the film R-rated.
Netflix later picked up the challenge, with Francis Lawrence attached to direct its own BioShock movie. That adaptation has been in development for years and has already undergone a budget reduction, with production still yet to begin.
As for del Toro returning to game development himself, his answer following the InSane experience is equally definitive: “never again.”
Considering how many fascinating projects del Toro has made across live-action film and animation, he certainly isn’t hurting for places to put his monsters.
He has also talked about eventually focusing exclusively on animation, a medium that gives him plenty of freedom to create strange worlds without having to wrestle with the very different storytelling demands of video games.
So anyone hoping to see Guillermo del Toro tackle a major video game property on the big screen probably shouldn’t hold their breath. His gaming adventures have given us some incredible what-could-have-beens, but del Toro sounds more than ready to leave that chapter behind.
