Netflix Revives Assassin’s Creed With Live-Action Series

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed has one of the most recognizable lore in video games, with a sprawling franchise that’s earned a reputation for epic worldbuilding and genre-defying stories. The Assassin’s Creed series is set for a new chapter as Netflix greenlights a live-action series of the same name.

Netflix had been in the works of producing Assassin’s Creed since 2020, according to a report. The series has changed hands a few times, but now, it appears Netflix has settled on a pair of showrunners: Roberto Patino and David Wiener. Patino has previously worked on FX’s Sons of Anarchy and HBO’s Westworld, while Wiener is most known for producing the Paramount+ Halo series and AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead.

The pair were just announced as showrunners earlier this week and published a joint statement about the series on social media.

“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 statement read. “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.”

Patino and Wiener added that they have been “having the time of our lives” developing Assassin’s Creed with Ubisoft and Netflix, and they aim to make it “undeniable for fans all over the planet.” The pair also promised that the production team “continues to grow and is now amazing.”

Assassin’s Creed has a wealth of lore to build from

Assassin’s Creed has long been one of the most instantly recognizable and ambitious series in gaming history. The first game was a “social stealth” action game set in the Third Crusade. After two iterations of the franchise, Ubisoft made a series-defining trilogy of games set in Renaissance Italy—Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations. The story and presentation of these games made a massive impact, and they were mostly remembered for Ezio Auditore, the mustachioed main character.

Assassin’s Creed has since expanded to 14 mainline entries over the last 18 years, with more RPG-influenced gameplay and larger open-world sandbox designs than the stealth-based origins. The timeline is flexible with games ranging from the American Revolution to the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean to Revolutionary Paris and Victorian London to Ancient Egypt to Classical Greece to Viking-age Britain to Baghdad in the Islamic Golden Age.

The latest title, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, drops players into feudal Japan, a setting many fans of the series have long been requesting. Reviews of Shadows have praised Ubisoft’s choice to refine its more recent RPG-infused design and focus on some of the essential parts that made the older titles beloved.

One of the most significant changes to the Assassin’s Creed series was the sheer quality of Shadows. Ubisoft has been criticized over the years for putting out Assassin’s Creed games on a strict annualized release schedule, even if they didn’t feel entirely ready. Fans have long been advocating for a similar strategy in regards to Assassin’s Creed in other media. In terms of television, Netflix’s live-action series would have a better chance of receiving a quality release than a movie with a two-year gap between films to develop the story.

We don’t know much about the series itself, however.

Little information has been released about the Netflix series, but from what we do know about the franchise, the narrative is most likely going to focus on the new iteration of a centuries-spanning conflict between the Assassins and the Templars. The key points that connect almost all the entries in the franchise are a modern-day component and the Animus. In the Animus, modern characters can relive the genetic memories of their ancestors to effectively “travel” to a recreated version of various moments throughout history.

The modern-day component of the Assassin’s Creed formula has focused on the same primary modern characters with the Assassins’ memories relived throughout the first 11 games. The past few have included a focus on a modern-day descendant of Connor in the Colonial-era Americas, Helena in the Viking era, and in the latest one, Edward in 19th-century London.

Fans are itching to know whether or not the Netflix series will continue with a modern-day component or just focus on the past, whether it will continue the lore and characters from the games, or follow a similar separate path as the 2016 live-action film starring Michael Fassbender. The Fassbender-led film was a minor hit, but most reviews were middling. But with so much interest in the Assassin’s Creed brand and how the team has learned from its mistakes over the years, the Netflix series seems to have all the stars aligned to succeed.