Remember Ubisoft's live-action Assassin's Creed TV series that it's been cooking up over at Netflix? No? Well, don't beat yourself up about it; I'm pretty sure Ubi's forgotten once or twice too. The studio was first chatting about its grand plans to make an AC TV show in 2017, in the afterglow of the (not very good) Michael Fassbender-led AC film.
Then all went quiet, save some burblings about an anime, until 2020. In the thick of Covid, one Guillemot or another bolted up in bed and remembered that they were supposed to be making an AC series. So we got an incredibly brief, 10-second teaser and, well, that was it. Then, three years later, it lost its showrunner.
So not going great, all round. Nevertheless, Variety reports that—after these long birth pangs—the series is officially moving ahead. The project has queued up Roberto Patino and David Wiener as showrunners and executive producers.
If those names don't ring any bells: Patino was a producer on Westworld and Sons of Anarchy, and—slightly less glamorously—creator of HBO Max's DMZ, which got lukewarm reviews. Wiener, meanwhile, was showrunner for season 2 of Paramount's Halo show—the one where Master Chief had sex.
Will John Assassin's Creed also have sex? Yes. No, really. A joint statement from Wiener and Patino described the series thusly: "It is about power and violence and sex and greed and vengeance." Which is news to me. I thought it was about clearing icons off an enormous map while your brain played elevator music.
It's not all about those baser impulses, mind you. "More than anything," say Patino and Wiener, "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." It's possible they've got the games mixed up with Death Stranding, now that I take a look at it.
I gotta be honest, my hopes are low for this one. It's your author's humble opinion that the Assassin's Creed series has long since spiralled into total, unparseable meaninglessness, and that Ubi would be well-served to wipe the whole slate clean and hit reset on the entire thing. I suspect it will not, and I also suspect this series will do its damndest to make us care about the Isu and the Pieces of Eden and what-have-you. That is, if it appears at all, and five years from now I'm not writing a news story that goes 'remember that Assassin's Creed show they announced five years ago? It's just been greenlit at Neo-Netflix.'
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