Video games. Hollywood’s next great frontier in the ever-expanding IP arms race.

For a decade-plus now, studios everywhere have been scratching and clawing, digging and diving, to find the next great comic book intellectual property. From the MCU to DCEU, from The Boys to Invincible, comic books and superheroes have proved to be the backbone of blockbuster filmmaking ever since X-Men and Spider-Man flipped the industry on its head back in the early 2000s. And while comic book properties look certain to remain king of the IP castle for the foreseeable future, there is another that’s set to enter the fray: video games.

Take The Witcher, for example, which laid claim to being Netflix's most-watched first season of television ever until Shonda Rhimes' world-conquering Bridgerton debuted late last year. Look at J.J. Abrams developing Portal and Paramount+’s long-awaited Halo series. HBO recently cast Pedro Pascal to lead their The Last of Us series, while Netflix is adapting Assassin’s Creed and Resident Evil to the small screen. Consider Sonic the Hedgehog being almost immediately given a sequel or Ryan Reynolds voicing Detective Pikachu. The video game IP war isn’t coming, it’s here.

And yet, despite the call-to-video-game-arms that every major studio seems to be undertaking, one of the most beloved, and primed to be adapted, video game franchises of the century remains untapped: BioShock.

RELATED: ‘Bioshock’: Gore Verbinski on Why the Movie Was Cancelled and His Planned Ending

A screenshot from BioShock
Image via 2K Games

BioShock was once set to become a film — and, if everything went well, a franchise — from Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski, who spoke to Collider earlier this year about his intentions for the long-dead project:

"It was talked about as one movie,” Verbinski told Collider's Steve Weintraub.

"And it was strange, my first meeting at Universal on 'BioShock' was sitting in a room and saying, 'Hey guys, this is a $200 million R-rated movie.' And it was silent. I remember my agent going, 'Why did you say that?' I'm like, because it is. Why just even trying to kill a movie you haven't even started? That's before getting a scripted before anything. I'm just I just want to be clear. And I think everybody at the studio was well, yeah, okay, maybe. Wow, no. It's big, we know."

Given the very nature of BioShock and its world, making a potential film R-rated was absolutely the right call, if only in terms of creative integrity and not necessarily marketability. But where Verbinski missed the mark — due to no fault of his own, as Hollywood simply wasn’t built for this sort of idea a decade ago — was the medium in which a BioShock story would be best told, as the scope of this saga calls not for a film, but for a television series. Here’s why.

An Ever-Changing Power Scale

A screenshot from BioShock
Image via 2K Games

The most science-fiction-indebted aspect of BioShock, even more so than its otherworldly locales, is ADAM, an in-world genetic material used to obtain superhuman powers.

As a result of Rapture’s unregulated ways, scientific research was rampant and rapid, leading to the discovery of ADAM, which was then used to create Plasmids, a type of chemical that alters a user’s genetic code to give them superhuman abilities. Those plasmids make up a murderer’s row of tantalizing superpowers, including the likes of Electro Bolt (the ability to shoot electricity from your hands), Incinerate (pyrokinesis), Winter Blast (the ability to shoot ice), Telekinesis, and many more.

Not everyone has access to all of the Plasmids, and even if they do, not everyone has the same mastery of them. The world of BioShock and the mechanics that prop up its power scale are constantly changing, allowing for a story that sees the hero fight his way through increasingly powerful opponents while simultaneously increasing in power himself — a journey best appreciated in its changeability through television episodes.

The Society Itself

A screenshot of BioShock
Image via 2K Games

The fall of a once-great society remains one of the most fascinating tales to tell; just look at how Rome is still lionized. The world of BioShock features the city of Rapture as a distillation of that idea, a city founded by enigmatic business tycoon Andrew Ryan who went all the way to the bottom of the ocean to build a paradise for mankind's greatest minds.

The plan was to create a society free of increasing restriction, oversight, and oppression from the world’s various forms of government and religion. That lack of oversight, however, ultimately proved to be Rapture’s Achilles' heel, as the lack of governmental leadership led citizens of the sunken city to gravitate towards political activists like Atlas, eventually leading to a civil war and the fall of the society itself.

By the time the protagonist is introduced to BioShock’s world, society is a remnant of the past, which would allow a long-form television series to not only navigate the present-day conditions of the ocean-floor hellscape but to travel back in time to fill in the blanks of what Rapture was like at its glistening, utopian best. A series could not only explore the way things are and who’s left in the wake, but how things came to be and who made it this way.

Remarkable Locales

A screenshot from BioShock
Image via 2K Games

Even if you’ve never delved into BioShock, the iconic underwater skyscrapers of Rapture are likely familiar, as 2K’s first-person shooter is one of the landmark video games of the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era.

A cross between Atlantis, 1960s New York City, Gotham City, and Star Wars' Otoh Gunga, the neon-coated streets of BioShock’s preeminent locale represent a tantalizing storytelling prospect in and of itself. How, and why, did Rapture come to be, both conceptually and physically? How does it continue on? Every corner you wander around or corridor you creep down, every building you stare up at in awe, and every shattered relic of an abandoned society you come across instigates curiosity and begs for exploration.

The world of BioShock is not merely constrained to the submarine, though, as the third entry in the franchise, BioShock: Infinite, took the game to the sprawling skies of Columbia, the city in the clouds. And we haven’t even mentioned the tantalizing, as-yet-unexplored terrestrial world that BioShock always seems to be running from.

By turning BioShock into a TV series, the story would have the room, but more importantly, time to explore the literal highs, lows, and everything in between that makes this world so tantalizing. There’s a reason video game fans spend countless hours playing their favorite titles: Because the world invites them in and keeps them there. With a world as comprehensive and all-consuming as BioShock, a TV series is the only medium in which that same phenomenon can be achieved.

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