Dear Netflix: Don’t Mess Up the Assassin’s Creed Lore

Assassin’s Creed, the beloved Ubisoft video game franchise, will get its live-action adaptation on Netflix thanks to a development greenlight finally coming to fruition. While this announcement was originally made back in 2020, the series has long been in a sort of limbo where the general idea was already in place, but a host of creative visionaries were coming and going for what must have seemed like eons. Fortunately, this difficult part of the development process is now apparently a thing of the past, as the series has now been officially assigned two showrunners who are going to tackle this adaptation together.

Netflix has greenlit two showrunners for its Assassin’s Creed live-action series adaptation. Roberto Patino and David Wiener are the two writers in question, with Patino having an impressive pedigree of working on award-winning series like Sons of Anarchy and Westworld, among others. Wiener, for his part, most recently worked on the Halo live-action series for Paramount+ while he had also served as a co-showrunner on AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead. Given the skill set that both of them bring to the table, fans should be excited that these two men will be on top of adapting this franchise in live-action form.

The two showrunners provided an official statement on the matter, clearly detailing why they love the idea of doing an Assassin’s Creed series while also revealing more about their connection to the games.

“David and I have been huge fans of Assassin’s Creed since it launched in 2007,” they stated. “Every day on this show, we’re reminded of the scope of this world and how deep the well is for storytelling in this universe. Underneath all the swashbuckling action and mystery are characters who are searching for identity, purpose, and faith. Characters whose journeys are both intimately personal and threaded together across centuries.”

They added that the show will also have themes that go beyond the action and history. “This is a show about the value of community, between individuals, between families, and between cultures,” they continued. “It’s also about the peril of being cut off from one another and our past. With Ubisoft’s full support and a strong backing from Netflix, we’re thrilled to be creating a show that we think fans around the world will fall in love with.”

The Assassin’s Creed video game series has a long and interesting history that may provide a clue as to what the series should go first in terms of where it sets its sights. The franchise was first released back in 2007 as an action-adventure stealth video game, one that introduced a whole new genre to the industry as “social stealth” thanks to an incredibly unique way of approaching the core stealth genre while also providing context to the world by adding a historical fiction spin. While the first two entries in the series did take place in what many might call expected places for the time (Assassin’s Creed was set in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade, while Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood was located in Renaissance Rome), the game that put the series on the map was Assassin’s Creed II.

The original Assassin’s Creed II took the mix of stealth action, historical accuracy, and RPG elements into the high society of Renaissance Italy, the then-burgeoning epicenter of the arts, commerce, and philosophy in Europe, and also introduced Ezio Auditore, one of the most beloved characters in the series. Subsequent titles such as Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations more than doubled down on the popularity of this setting, with Brotherhood in particular introducing two unique female protagonists: Lorenzo the Fox and Maria Belludi, who were excellent role models for men and women, respectively, during that era.

A total of 14 Assassin’s Creed entries have since been released, each one taking a drastically different setting and world-building approach than the last. Games were set in Colonial America, the high seas of the Caribbean, during the French Revolution, the heights of Roman and Greek society, the Mongol Empire, and even the Cairo of Ancient Egypt. While recent games have all but officially transitioned the series into an open-world RPG hybrid of sorts, the latest game, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, finally allowed players to explore feudal Japan as the main protagonist.

Fans of the franchise were incredibly happy with how Assassin’s Creed: Shadows turned out, especially considering that Ubisoft reportedly pushed back the title by one year to allow the developers more time to fine-tune its myriad systems and worlds. Whether or not this increased care and consideration will make its way into the Netflix live-action adaptation remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: fans are excited.

The streaming adaptation, as was mentioned, is quite expected to stick to the general story framework that veteran fans of the game are accustomed to: modern-day characters can relive the lives of their past selves thanks to a sort of genetic memory with each of these past selves being caught in the crossfire of an ancient conflict between Assassins and Templars that has somehow been going on for literal millennia. As of now, there has been no concrete detail or information on who, exactly, will be cast as the lead characters or which eras in history the series will cover first.

Trepidation As To This Next Adaptation

It is important to note that Assassin’s Creed is not the first attempt to bring this franchise into a live-action form: there has, in fact, already been a feature film starring Michael Fassbender. Assassin’s Creed, as a 2016 feature film, turned out to be rather lackluster and received a box office that, while healthy enough, was not spectacular thanks to its middling performance in the eyes of critics and audiences alike. Whether or not the series has anything to do with this film is yet to be seen, but this adaptation will almost certainly serve as a new beginning for Assassin’s Creed in live-action form.

The overall entertainment landscape is also more amenable to video game adaptations than ever before. In particular, HBO’s The Last of Us has shown that if a video game series adaptation is well handled, it can become one of the best titles on television in a given season. With Netflix’s proven record of wanting to invest in genre storytelling, especially within the fantasy and sci-fi elements, there is hope that Assassin’s Creed can become a major success if done right.

That said, it is also worth being cautious at this point: the reasons why so many people love the Assassin’s Creed games are just as many as the pitfalls that so many other adaptations have fallen into over the years. The series has a sort of all-encompassing world view that traverses a variety of historical epochs as well as continents, each one with its protagonist and all of them somehow connected by an ongoing story in the present. The challenge for this show will be to balance out these many different facets of Assassin’s Creed.

There is still a long wait ahead as far as casting is concerned, release dates, and even which historical location will be depicted first, but the news alone has fans hopeful that this time, Assassin’s Creed will be able to take advantage of the success of the games and maintain it for years to come. With Netflix now setting up the right team and with Ubisoft reportedly having faith in their new showrunners, Assassin’s Creed has a very good chance of working.

Video game adaptations are here to stay, and Assassin’s Creed looks to have all the pieces in place to become a major entry for this next wave of entertainment.