Five years after its initial announcement, Netflix is finally ready to press ahead with its live-action Assassin’s Creed series, based on Ubisoft’s flagship stealth action game franchise, as the project has been officially greenlit under the leadership of showrunners Roberto Patino and David Wiener.
“We’ve been fans of Assassin’s Creed since its release in 2007,” said Patino and Wiener, previous helmers of the HBO Max miniseries DMZ and the Paramount+ adaptation Halo, respectively, 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 — about people searching for purpose, struggling with questions of identity and destiny and faith.”
“It is about power and violence and sex and greed and vengeance,” they added. “But more than anything, this is a show about the value of human connection, across cultures, across time. And it’s about what we stand to lose as a species, when those connections break.”
The project has long been in gestation due to the constant switching of hands, with the show initially set to be helmed by Die Hard writer Jeb Stuart before his exit in 2023, subsequently gaining an experienced team of veteran writers such as Emily St John Mandel (Station Eleven) and Sam Reynolds (The Walking Dead: World Beyond) based on a previous writers room report, which also listed Patino and Wiener’s involvement.
For now, there isn’t much to go on when it comes to the adaptation’s plot, although here’s hoping it doesn’t follow in the same footsteps as the 2016 20th Century Studios feature film, which also had a strong focus on “human connection”, just not the humans audiences were actually interested in, placing the Assassin’s in the backseat and focusing on the arguably less interesting modern component.
Although no release window was announced, the Netflix adaptation’s logline offers a little more information, reading: “Assassin’s Creed is a high-octane thriller centred 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. The series follows its characters across pivotal historical events as they battle to shape humanity’s destiny.”
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
Joyce Ong
Si Jia
