Five years after Ubisoft announced its deal with Netflix to make an Assassin’s Creed series, Netflix has finally confirmed the show has been “greenlit.”
This one has been a long time coming. But will it be any good?
The Netflix Assassin’s Creed show will be a live action series, not an animated show. And it does have some pretty prominent names at the helm. Roberto Patino and David Wiener will team up as executive producers and showrunners.
While these two haven’t come as a pair before, they have absolutely loads of experience both working in TV and video game adaptations.
David Wiener was showrunner for the Halo TV series, and also worked on shows like Homecoming and Fear the Walking Dead. Patino worked on DMZ, Westworld and Sons of Anarchy.
“We’ve been fans of Assassin’s Creed since its release in 2007. Every day we work on this show, we come away excited and humbled by the possibilities that Assassin’s Creed opens to us,” the show running pair said in a joint statement.
“Beneath the scope, the spectacle, the parkour and the thrills is a baseline for the most essential kind of human story… It is about power and violence and sex and greed and vengeance.”
As yet no writing staff or cast members have been announced, but the blurb does tell us a little on what to expect from Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed.
“Assassin’s Creed is a high-octane thriller centered on the secret war between two shadowy factions — one set on determining mankind’s future through control and manipulation, while the other fights to preserve free will,” says Netflix.
“The series follows its characters across pivotal historical events as they battle to shape humanity’s destiny.”
What’s not clear yet is how much the Netflix series will dive into the Animus side of the Assassin’s Creed series. Where early games in the series have the Animus concept as a core part of the narrative — people in the current time are injected into the past to relive its events. But later titles are much more grounded in the place and time they are ostensibly set.
Netflix’s green-lighting of this probably-expensive series may well have something to do with the relative success of the most recent game in the series, Assassin’s Creed Shadows. It’s based in Japan, a setting fans have asked Ubisoft to mine since the series’s early days.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the third-best-selling game of the year so far in the US, according to Gamespot.
This won’t of course be the first major adaptation of Assassin’s Creed. In 2016 a film version was released, starring Michael Fassbender. It was not a big success at the box office, and was labelled a certified stinker by the critics, ending up at am 18% Rotten Tomatoes freshness score.
Hopefully Netflix’s TV show will far better. But you can currently stream the film at Netflix, Prime Video or Disney+ if you're curious.
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