Ubisoft's extreme sports game is being turned into a movie… and honestly, I'd watch 90 minutes of people doing snowboard stunts and wingsuit flights in the Alps

Someone in a wingsuit flying toward camera while people do bike tricks

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

The scramble to turn every videogame into a movie is now in full swing, and another film adaptation has just been announced: this time it's Riders Republic, Ubisoft's 2021 open world extreme sports sandbox. The game didn't have much of a plot beyond competing in biking, skiing, snowboarding, and wingsuiting races and competitions, so if Ubisoft thinks they can turn that into a movie…

Yeah, I'd probably watch it. Wouldn't you watch it? I like seeing people do bike flips and ski jumps and snowboard… things. Who doesn't love seeing someone jump off a cliff in a wingsuit? It's rad.

The pair also directed 2022's Batgirl, starring Leslie Grace, Brendan Fraser, J.K. Simmons, and Michael Keaton—which I didn't even get the chance to not see because Warner Bros decided it was more profitable to write the film off as a tax break than release it. Brutal. Writing Riders Republic is screenwriter Noé Debré who won a Palme d'Or for the French film Dheepan (didn't see it) in 2015.

The track record for Ubisoft film adaptations is… mixed, I guess you'd say. At one end of the scale is Uwe Boll's notoriously stinky Far Cry film from 2008, in the "so-so" region you've got some bland attempts at adaptations like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and 2016's Assassin's Creed. The best, I think, is horror comedy Werewolves Within, based on the social deduction VR game published by Ubisoft.

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Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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