Biopic was never a problem for me, but for a long time I was mispronouncing ‘miniseries’ as min-is-eries
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about the English language, it’s that there’s no such thing as a mispronunciation, just geography.
Biopic is frequently (but not exclusively) pronounced ‘Bi-opic’ in the UK, as evidenced by this Macmillan Dictionary example. And then, we have Cambridge University Press reversing the decision, and granting ‘bi-opic’ to the US.
So I figure, pronounce it however you like.
Interesting. So it does sound like the bi-opic pronunciation has gained more widespread acceptance over the years. I now feel retroactively as a little bit less of a dumbass for pronouncing it “bi-opic” at first. 
I’ve only heard it a handful of times but have read it lots and I always mentally pronounce it bi-oppic. Bio-pick sounds too slangy. How often do you hear someone talk about seeing a “pic” without being extremely slangy? Whereas bi-oppic sounds like it’s something related to biography. If I had to say it out loud, I’d probably wind up saying “bio-film” instead even though that means something else: at least no one will think I don’t know how to pronounce bio-pick, and I will not have to internally wince at using such a clunky phrase.
I just saw a scene in a comedy show about this very mispronunciation about a week or two ago. But I can’t remember what show it was. Perhaps The I.T. Crowd?
Ring any bells?
Even that isn’t necessarily true. Not long ago, I saw a locally produced play at the community theater here in town. It was the life story of one of the town’s founders. Local celebration of one of our historic heroes, you know the sort of thing.
Anyway, a friend of mine described it as a “biopic,” pronounced “bi-opic.” I repeat, this wasn’t even a “pic,” it was a play. So I take it that my friend did not parse “biopic” as a contraction of “biographical picture,” but rather as just a word that meant “a dramatic presentation of someone’s life story.” It’s not clear to me that she even connected the “bio” part of “biopic” with the “bio” in “biography.”
Language changes, my friends. What are you gonna do?
Plus, no one outside the entertainment industry calls a movie a “picture,” which of course was originally a shortened form of “moving picture.” Regular people say “movie” or “film” most often. So the “pic” portion of “biopic” isn’t obviously and necessarily a reference to film for most people.
On top of that, -ic is a common suffix for adjectives in English: e.g., epic, magnetic, cephalic, anthropomorphic, etc. Although “biopic” is a noun, that may or may not be clear from context. There’s plenty of reason to guess wrongly about how to pronounce this word. In short, the pronunciation situation is what sailors would call “confused seas.”
Honestly, people who insist that the pronunciation should be obvious strike me as parochial in the same way that sitcoms set in LA are parochial. LA is overrepresented as a setting for American TV series because most such series are written and produced in LA. There’s an implicit assumption in both cases that LA culture is pretty much universal American culture, when that’s clearly not the case.
/ˈbaɪ̯oˌpɪk/
That secondary stress on the third syllable is crucial.
There’s a nice quote out there for this:
“Never make fun of people for mispronouncing a word. It means they learned it by reading.”
Agree. There are many words I’ve never heard spoken out loud and this is one of them. I had no idea what the origin was of the components of the word and my gut instinct was “bi-opic”.
That would explain why it’s the common pronunciation in Aus English. Given a choice, wie mainly prefer to take our cues from the Brits.
I’ve (still) never heard the word pronounced out loud. I too thought it was bye-OPP-ik. I’ve only ever seen it in print.
There are lots of words that start with “gi” with a soft G sound: giraffe, gist, ginger, giant, …
It’s an acronym, not an abbreviation. Acronym pronunciations have no relation to the pronunciation of the full word. You don’t pronounce AWOL with a short A just because it stands for “absent”.
Interesting. I have noticed several examples where actors read their lines wrong (like in Star Trek TNG s01e06 when Mr. Kosinski said “asymptomatically” when it should have been “asymptotically”). and I thought to myself, “Why didn’t the director say CUT and do another take? Did nobody notice it?”, but SNL is live, so there you go.
I say a biographical moving picture is a bio-pic.
Bi-opic would be a portmanteau of bionic myopic, a nearsighted cyborg.
That’s just stupid. English contains too many homophones. What kind of monster wants to create more of them?
Some people have said, having never heard the word and having only seen it in print, that they assumed the pronunciation is ‘bye-OPP-ik’.
But what about context? If you’re reading something about a biographical motion picture and you didn’t know the word ‘biopic’, wouldn’t you deduce that ‘biopic’ meant ‘biographical motion picture’ and that it’s pronounced BY-oh-pik’? I mean, it’s a noun and not an adjective. 
And here’s another example where we can’t make assumptions about the English language - ‘pictures’ is used frequently in the UK, as in 'shall we go to the pictures?, or ‘have you seen the latest picture by Spielberg?’ ‘Movie’ is distinctly American sounding.
In my case, apparently no. Never once occurred to me. My brain didn’t see the constituent parts, nor did it treat the word as an adjective, though perhaps pronunciation cues were taken from “myopic.”
Interestingly enough, the very first comment on that video says, “Nope, it’s pronounced bi-op-ic.” The comments as a whole basically reproduce the same discussion we’re having here.
Although the “bi-AH-pic” folks at YouTube did add one additional argument, that I don’t think I’ve seen here. Namely: Do you pronounce “biography” as “BYE-oh-graphy?” No, you pronounce it as “Bi-AH-graphy.” In other words, the “bio” in “biography” is pronounced EXACTLY THE SAME as the “bio” in “bi-AH-pic.” So how can “bi-AH-pic” possibly be wrong?
On the flip side, how do you pronounce “biosphere” and “biodome” and “biomass” and “biometric”? It seems there is some linguistic rule at play here, especially when “bio” and its ending can be separated into a prefix and standalone word.