Assassin’s Creed Live-Action Series Confirmed At Netflix

It’s a day ending in ‘y’ folks, so you know what that means… another buzzy new adaptation of a hugely successful video game franchise is in the works! Yes, with everything from Split Fiction to The Legend Of Zelda to Mass Effect currently in various stages of film and TV adaptation development, Netflix — who’ve enjoyed success in this field with the likes of Arcane, The Witcher, and Castlevania in recent years — have just committed to a biggie. Per Deadline‘s reporting, after years in limbo, a live-action series based on Ubisoft’s stealth action franchise Assassin’s Creed has finally been greenlit at the streamer.

Netflix initially announced it was diving into Ubisoft’s world of assassins, Animuses (Animi/), and templars way back in October 2020, just three years after Justin Kurzel’s somewhat underwhelming, Michael Fassbender starring Assassin’s Creed hit cinemas in 2017. Radio silence — and two further AC games (9th century Baghdad-set Mirage and Sengoku Era Japanese adventure Shadows) — have followed in the nigh-on five years since. But today’s green light confirmation brings with it renewed hope for a proper historical romp heading our way, as Westworld alum Roberto Patino and Halo‘s David Wiener have signed on to serve as creators, showrunners, and executive producers on the show.

“We’ve been fans of Assassin’s Creed since its release in 2007,” the co-showrunners said in a joint statement accompanying today’s announcement. “Every day we work on this show, we come away excited and humbled by the possibilities that Assassin’s Creed opens to us. 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, across cultures, across time, and it’s about what we stand to lose as a species, when those connections break.”

In terms of whether Patino and Wiener’s series will follow the games or go its own way, we don’t know just yet. We also don’t know who’ll star, when it’ll be set, or when indeed we might expect to see Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed hit our screens. But with the streaming giant’s weight behind it, The Witcher looking to leave a space for a major game-to-series adaptation on Netflix very soon, and the new showrunners certainly talking the talk, we’re cautiously optimistic to see whether they can also walk the walk — or, er, eagle dive the eagle dive, as the case may be. Watch this space!