Way back in 2020, Netflix announced a partnership with gaming publisher Ubisoft, but there haven’t exactly been a string of massive announcements and series in the team-up since then. Now, though, it’s finally announced the flagship series that was promised, adapting just about the biggest Ubisoft franchise possible.
There will be a big-budget Assassin’s Creed series on Netflix at some point, as it confirmed last week, and that should be major news for any fan of the long-running series of games. With five years of silence, it was beginning to look like the project might have quietly been put on ice.
Now we know that it will come out, although there’s still no timeline in public for when that’ll happen. We don’t know who might star in the show, or indeed which of the many games it’ll adapt. It could be a slight reimagining, like the ill-fated 2016 movie, but my guess would be that Netflix will aim to play things safer.
In fact, I’d put my money on the series adapting what feels like it’s still the most beloved sequence in the series – Assassin’s Creed 2, Brotherhood and Revelations. These three games told the story of the Italian assassin Ezio Auditore da Firenze, and cemented the franchise as a chart titan, rather than a flash in the pan.
Ezio was also a charismatic leading man, and there are a whole heap of subplots and stories to get through in those games, making for plenty of material to adapt. It takes place in an evocative period of history full of interesting real-life figures, and has the capacity to offer some brilliant locations and costumes.
What I’m more interested in, though, is how Netflix will handle the sci-fi framing device that has blessed and cursed Assassin’s Creed for so long. All of its adventures are supposedly being experienced by people in the near future, through a VR-style device called the Animus that lets them experience the memories of their ancestors.
That sets the stage for a centuries-long battle between the Templars and Assassins across multiple time periods and locations, but also a futuristic version of that same fight. It’s why there’s always a rumour that the next AC game might finally be a sci-fi one set in the future, although that never comes to fruition.
The safe play is to ignore that whole side of things, arguably, but I’m hoping that Netflix has some ambition and embraces it. If it can figure out a way to keep its future sections interesting, rather than being boring distractions from the historical segments, it could be on to a satisfying fusion between historical fiction and sci-fi.
We’re not going to know more for a while, I’d guess, but this is exciting news for one of the biggest and best streaming sites out there.
