Will Netflix Succeed Where the 2016 Movie Failed?

Video game series Assassin’s Creed has found its home at Netflix. The streaming service has given the official green light for the Assassin’s Creed series after a long and arduous development process that may have initially begun as early as 2020.

Netflix has since given both Roberto Patino and David Wiener showrunner status on the series, with the writing duo both bringing extensive experience on various award-winning series such as Sons of Anarchy, Westworld, and AMC’s The Walking Dead. The writers released a joint statement on the franchise, one that reflects both their gratitude for and excitement towards the project.

“We’ve been fans of Assassin’s Creed since it released 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,” Patino and Wiener said. “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.”

In their message, the two also expressed gratitude and enthusiasm towards Ubisoft, Netflix, and their production staff, even going as far as to call them “amazing” and promising something “undeniable for fans all over the planet.”

A Franchise Ripe for Adaptation

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed was first released all the way back in 2007, taking up the “social stealth” sub-genre of action games. Set at the time of the Crusades, the story followed an assassin named Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad. While its stealth element made the title unique at the time, the Assassin’s Creed that fans came to know and love was the Renaissance Italy trilogy—Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations—which found its protagonist in Ezio Auditore.

The series has since expanded with 14 more mainline entries in the past 18 years. The newer games have begun to abandon the stealth-oriented origins of the series for a wider open-world RPG format. The games have also spanned a wide variety of locales and historical eras, from the American Revolution to the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean, from Revolutionary Paris to Victorian London, from Ancient Egypt to Classical Greece, Viking-era Britain, and more recently Baghdad in the Islamic Golden Age.

Assassin’s Creed’s newest entry is Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, which finally brings the game to long-awaited feudal Japan. Shadows is getting high praise for streamlining the franchise’s newer RPG approach while still capturing the fun gameplay elements that made fans fall in love with the series in the first place. One of the reasons for the game’s early acclaim has been Ubisoft’s decision to delay the game for quality purposes, a move that series fans are hoping Netflix follows when it comes to its adaptation.

Details on Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed So Far

Details about the new series are still quite scant, but from what we know, it is expected that, like the games, the series will follow the decades-old secret war between Assassins and Templars over the future of mankind. A key plot device that is the series is the Animus, a machine that is capable of unlocking ancestral genetic memories of the protagonist, often transporting them to different points in history all over the world.

The cast for the show is yet to be announced, and with the details about the show being shrouded in secrecy, it is a matter of fans’ speculation whether the show will focus on the current roster of Assassins and Templars in the series or take a completely different direction. Since the earlier 2016 adaptation starring Michael Fassbender deviated from the mainline characters of the games, it seems like Netflix’s series will do the same.

As to whether or not the Netflix series will make any direct or indirect references to the Fassbender film, it is yet to be seen. The film was not a huge hit, but the performance of Michael Fassbender alone has earned it a cult following, and Netflix’s own Assassin’s Creed is expected to eclipse the earlier work regardless. Game-to-screen adaptations have been a risky field, and the quality of material on streaming platforms varies. Netflix has had its share of troubles with previous projects like The Witcher, so it’s yet to be seen if Assassin’s Creed will be a smash hit like HBO’s The Last of Us or a bust like its own Witcher series.