Today, Netflix announced that they’ve officially greenlit an Assassin’s Creed live-action television series.
Back in 2020, Netflix and Assassin’s Creed developer Ubisoft announced an agreement in which the streaming service would develop content based on the video game franchise. This adaptation will be the first series spanning from that agreement.
Roberto Patino (DMZ, Westworld, & Sons of Anarchy) and David Wiener (Halo, Homecoming, & The Killing) are set to serve as the show’s creators, showrunners, and executive producers. Gerard Guillemot, Margaret Boykin, and Austin Dill will also represent Ubisoft Film & Television, serving as executive producers for the series.
Patino and Wiener had the following to say regarding their excitement for the series:
“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,” said Wiener and Patino 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. 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. We’ve got an amazing team behind us with the folks at Ubisoft and our champions at Netflix, and we’re committed to creating something undeniable for fans all over the planet.”
While the plot and premise of the live-action Assassin’s Creed has yet to be revealed, the team behind the adaptation will have a slew of source material to pick from to help serve as inspiration. Since its debut in 2007, there has been 14 mainline titles and 17 spinoffs based in the same universe.
Locations vary from Russia to Norway, with timeframes spanning from the Viking Age to the present day. Regardless of the setting, the story always returns to the secret war between two shadowy factions: the Assassins and the Templars. The latter seeks to determine mankind’s future through control and manipulation, while the former fights to preserve free will.
It is worth noting that this isn’t the first attempt that Hollywood has taken to adapt Assassin’s Creed. Back in 2016, Michael Fassbender starred in a film of the same name, set in the same universe as the video games, but featuring an original story that expands the series’ mythology. The film underperformed at the box office, grossing $240.7 million worldwide against its $125 million budget, resulting in the cancellation of the originally planned sequel.
Currently, there is no release date or window for the Netflix adaptation.
