Francis Lawrence to go from Hunger Games to video games, will direct Netflix’s BioShock movie

BioShock is one of many video games that Hollywood has had its eye on for a long time, both because it was a huge hit and because it’s a video game that’s famous for having a story—meaning, in theory, it should be relatively easy to just type out everything that happens, put somebody famous in there to play BioShock Man, and then clear some space on the shelf for the “Best Adaptation” trophy from the Game Awards. The problem with BioShock is that it’s about choice, or at least the illusion of choice, so simply repeating the bullet points of the plot doesn’t really cover it.

And so Netflix, a streaming service with algorithms upon algorithms designed to create the illusion of choice (oh sure, it was “your idea” to watch The Gray Man), has emerged as the only company brave enough to venture into the depths of the ocean and try to come back with an actual BioShock movie. We first heard about Netflix picking up BioShock in February, and today the streamer announced that Francis Lawrence—of Hunger Games sequels, Red Sparrow, and Constantine fame—has signed on to direct.

We still don’t know whether the movie will be an adaptation of the first game, something involving the multiverse stuff of BioShock Infinite, or just something that takes place in BioShock’s iconic underwater city of Rapture, but we’d like to say that some of those ideas seem much more complicated and expensive than others and that this is a project where it might be wise to not bite off more than you can chew. (That being said, we could see Lawrence’s best friend Jennifer Lawrence as Elizabeth from Infinite, at least the older, jaded version who shows up later, but even in the video games Elizabeth was the embodiment of biting off more than you can chew.)