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Series will be led by Westworld, Halo alums.
The dual protagonists of Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Credit:
Ubisoft
The dual protagonists of Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Credit:
Ubisoft
The long-running video game series Assassin’s Creed will get a live-action TV series adaptation. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter report that Netflix has greenlit the series after years of development hell; the intention to produce the series was announced in 2020.
The series had been through multiple creative teams even before it was greenlit, but Netflix settled on two co-showrunners. Roberto Patino, a writer on FX’s Sons of Anarchy and HBO’s Westworld, will join David Wiener, who led Paramount+’s Halo TV series as well as Fear the Walking Dead.
The two released a joint statement with the news that the show is moving forward:
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. 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.
Not many details are known about the series, beyond the obvious: like the games, it will follow a shadow war between the rival Templars and Assassins factions fought across centuries and cultures, with characters diving into genetic memory to experience the lives of ancestors who played pivotal roles in the war. There are no public details about characters or casting.
There was a 2016 film adaptation of the series starring Michael Fassbender that was a modest success, but it’s unclear whether the TV series will be related—it seems doubtful.
The Assassin’s Creed series began with an experimental “social stealth” game released in 2007 and set in Israel during the Crusades. It was that game’s Renaissance Italy-set immediate sequels—Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations—that really put the franchise on the map. There have been 14 mainline Assassin’s Creed games over 18 years, as the series has evolved from a city-based stealth game to a more ambitious open-world RPG format. Other settings so far have included the American Revolution, pirates in the Caribbean, revolutionary Paris, Victorian London, Classical Egypt, Ancient Greece, Viking-era Britain, Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, and most recently, feudal Japan.
Earlier this year, I particularly enjoyed Assassin’s Creed Shadows—the just-released feudal Japan entry—because, like other recent entries in the series, it settled into a sort of comfort-food approach after earlier periods of experimentation. The game also succeeded partly because its publisher delayed it to give developers time to focus on quality. Let’s hope Netflix has that same kind of mentality with this show.
