Netflix and Ubisoft Team Up for Ambitious Assassin’s Creed Adaptation

The long-rumored live-action adaptation of the video game franchise has been in development hell for years, with multiple attempts stalling after being announced in 2020. The series has now officially been greenlit for Netflix, with the French studio Ubisoft announcing a new team of showrunners at the helm.

The new showrunners include Roberto Patino and David Wiener, who have both worked on high-profile Netflix and other streaming originals. Roberto Patino has written for the FX series Sons of Anarchy and the HBO series Westworld. Wiener has led the showrun team on the Paramount+ series Halo, as well as the AMC series Fear the Walking Dead.

Patino and Wiener have also jointly released a statement about the series and their plans for it.

“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,” they wrote. “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. But more than anything, this is a show about the value of human connection, transcending cultures and time. And it’s about what we stand to lose as a species when those connections break.”

Assassin’s Creed Story on screen

Patino and Wiener went on to say that they were excited to be working with Ubisoft and Netflix to “tell the most epic, powerful, imaginative, specific, and unforgettable Assassin’s Creed story on screen,” also thanking their team behind the series, which they call “amazing.”

Fans of Assassin’s Creed can also be excited for an onscreen adaptation, but also nervous about the possibility of a new entry being muddled and watered down. The Assassin’s Creed series, however, has shown some positive signs in its direction.

The recent Assassin’s Creed: Shadows game, the first in the series set in feudal Japan (a favorite among fans), has generally been praised for honing the more modern RPG style of the Assassin’s Creed series, rather than completely rehashing older iterations of the gameplay.

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Shadows Game Launches With No Problem at All for PlayStation 5 Owners

Fans also hope that the long-in-development Netflix series will be afforded the same kind of care by Netflix. A notable part of Shadows’ development success was a more relaxed release, with Ubisoft delaying its initial planned release by an entire year. It will be interesting to see if Netflix is willing to take the same approach if development is bogged down, or if the streamer is going to try and squeeze the series out the door quickly.

Fans also have a number of questions about how exactly the series will pan out. We have yet to hear any casting information about the show, nor do we know much about the story or whether it will be an origin story for some of the franchise’s more popular protagonists.

With the previous attempt to bring Assassin’s Creed to the screen, the 2016 Michael Fassbender-led film, telling a somewhat disconnected story, it’s hard to know if the Netflix series will be a direct tie-in or a completely new story.

Fassbender’s film has a reputation for having done moderately well, but it is still receiving a mediocre reception overall. It is also not known whether or not the Netflix series will even acknowledge the existence of Fassbender’s film.

Fans shouldn’t be surprised if the Netflix series takes an entirely different approach. The success of streaming service content, particularly in sprawling, worldbuilding-intensive fantasy and historical fiction, has been immense over the last several years. In addition, video game adaptations have also found a foothold in an industry that previously shied away from them.

Whether Assassin’s Creed can live up to the standard set by the best of these remains to be seen, but it certainly has a high bar to clear. Netflix has the brand recognition, the financial means, and the resources to do right by the Assassin’s Creed series, if it’s willing to put in the work to make it so.

The success of HBO’s own recent The Last of Us adaptation has already proven that high-fidelity game-to-screen adaptations can be major successes both critically and financially. Netflix, meanwhile, has had success with similar projects in The Witcher, although the overall success of the production of that series has been mixed.

It remains to be seen how the long-rumored and long-desired Assassin’s Creed series will do at Netflix, and for now, fans can only wait and see how the series develops with new showrunners and a fresh coat of paint.