The Human Heart of Assassin’s Creed: Beyond the Action

Video game publisher Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series has been on a perpetual development cycle in live-action form for years. Since at least 2020, a TV show has been in the works for the popular stealth-action franchise. But as of this week, Netflix has confirmed a show is, indeed, now officially in development.

Specifically, the streaming platform has not only greenlit an Assassin’s Creed series, but they’ve also hired two high-profile showrunners to bring the project to life. The new creative team, Roberto Patino and David Wiener, both have experience writing for live-action adaptations of other big-budget video game franchises. Patino’s past writing includes FX’s Sons of Anarchy and HBO’s Westworld, while Wiener was a lead writer for the Paramount+ Halo series and is a regular writer and producer for AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead.

In a statement, the new showrunners released alongside Netflix’s official announcement, they made their passion for the Assassin’s Creed franchise clear. In the series premiere episode, they were not only fans of the property but also took a moment to gush about what the show means to them.

“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,” the pair wrote in the 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, transcending cultures and time. And it’s about what we stand to lose as a species when those connections break.”

They went on to promise fans that Ubisoft and Netflix were also “full partners” in making the best possible Assassin’s Creed series for fans, praising their “amazing” team of producers while also promising to come “damn near the impossible: an undeniable, in every sense, show for fans all over the planet.”

Origins of Assassin’s Creed

Assassin’s Creed is itself a series with a rich history. Since its introduction as a “social stealth” action video game in 2007, during the Crusades, the series has reimagined history for a modern audience with each successive mainline release. It wasn’t until Ubisoft’s Renaissance Italy trilogy, Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations, that the franchise began to take off with players. The three installments, all starring the series’ most well-known character, Ezio Auditore, were the first to balance historical discovery, existential discovery, and high-octane combat into one consistent package.

For the last 18 years, Assassin’s Creed has released 14 mainline entries and several spin-offs. Each game has diverged from a stealth-action platforming game to the more RPG-influenced, open-world structure seen in its most recent entries. The series has also diverged across much of history, most notably, the American Revolution in Assassin’s Creed III, the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Revolutionary Paris in Assassin’s Creed Unity, Victorian London in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Ancient Egypt in Assassin’s Creed Origins, Classical Greece in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and Viking era Britain in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Its newest, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, has shifted the series to its first-ever Japanese feudal setting.

It was a setting fans of the series had been clamoring for for years, and its critical praise has been largely attributable to how Ubisoft refines its recent RRPG-style while still keeping the gameplay roots that made the franchise famous in the first place. One of the major reasons Ubisoft was able to achieve such success so quickly, according to players, was by delaying the game’s launch to raise its quality threshold. This has also been a bone of contention for fans of the film adaptation in 2016 starring Michael Fassbender, who felt the game was too high-quality for a live-action version to ever achieve. Hopefully, Netflix and its new showrunners take this lesson to heart as well.

Series Will Focus on “Secret War” for Humanity’s Fate

Assassin’s Creed has been clear from the jump, in both its games and the 2016 Michael Fassbender film, on where its core focus will lie. That’s because at the core of every Assassin’s Creed story to date is the concept of a “secret war” being waged for all of humanity. The two warring sides are the Assassins and the Templars, ancient secret societies separated by their views on whether humanity is destined for a better future or not. The Animus, a machine that allows living people to experience their genetic ancestors’ memories, has been used for centuries to identify the next best hope for humanity with which to end the war. Each game has also followed an Assassin on a different continent, in different centuries, and in diverse historical conflicts, to live out this same arc. These factors both provide continuity for the series and great latitude in terms of storytelling variety.

While no specific plot details have been mentioned by the new showrunners or Netflix, a great number of potential locations and storylines exist for this show that were only hinted at or completely unexplored in the games. As such, whether any of the major characters from the games will appear on the show or not, and whether it will be connected to the existing lore or establish its independent continuity, remains to be seen. A trend seems to be that adaptations of large, in-universe connected game franchises like these generally tell their own independent stories. Since the 2016 Michael Fassbender Assassin’s Creed movie took such a different tack, the Netflix show will probably follow suit. That said, with players mixed on that movie and Netflix often making exceptions to that trend with other shows, it’s impossible to say at this point.

Netflix’s Version May (or May Not) Acknowledge the Fassbender Film

The 2016 Assassin’s Creed film starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard as the primary Assassins had a mixed critical reception, and despite becoming a modest success, failed to break into the top ranks of either video game movie adaptations or popular movies overall. It also happened to be the peak of the previous generation of home consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Assassin’s Creed is as good a big-budget series as any to reboot with streaming’s increased market share for long-form media and the further influx of high-budget game adaptations. The Fassbender Assassin’s Creed film will likely be either entirely ignored or directly contradicted if Netflix’s show takes a different direction, just as the Netflix Witcher did with the 2001 movie.

Netflix’s latest decision has, as stated before, come at an opportune time. Video game adaptations have been in more high-profile development than ever, with some, like HBO’s The Last of Us, also hitting new highs in terms of public reception and awards recognition. Netflix has also found success with its own The Witcher adaptation of a game series, but even that hasn’t been without the occasional creative controversy as well. If nothing else, Assassin’s Creed gives Netflix both a globally recognizable name and a new level of high-budget fantasy-historical filmmaking to vie for in a series whose content had already clearly outlined high stakes from the jump.