Assassin’s Creed: A Franchise That Keeps Reinventing Itself

One of the most highly anticipated game-to-screen adaptations has officially gone green. Netflix has confirmed that a live-action series based on the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise has been given the green light to move forward into production, and that showrunners have been brought on to start fleshing out the details.

Series showrunners Roberto Patino and David Wiener have both been appointed by Netflix to spearhead the new project, which has been in some stage of development or another since at least 2020. Patino, who has written for FX’s Sons of Anarchy and HBO’s Westworld, and Wiener, who has worked on AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead and is set to helm the Paramount+ adaptation of Halo, wrote together in a joint statement about how the idea to take the helm of the series came about and how it made them feel.

“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 reads. “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 continued, adding that they are determined to craft the best version of Assassin’s Creed possible in a TV show form.

“We have an amazing team, led by Ubisoft and Netflix, helping us do that. We’re building a world undeniable for fans all over the planet,” they said. “We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on.”

Assassin’s Creed: Everything You Need to Know

In case you’ve been living under a rock (or off the grid to avoid the surveillance of various corrupt in-game factions), Assassin’s Creed has been a household name in gaming for well over a decade and a half. The original game launched in 2007 as a social stealth-action series set during the Crusades, but it found much more success with the Renaissance Italy-based trilogy that came afterwards: Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations.

The Renaissance series was home to Ezio Auditore, one of the most iconic and adored characters in video game lore, and reaped players with a captivating mix of real-world historical intrigue, big-budget philosophical debate, and nearly non-stop combat and action. This template has been used since the franchise has continued to move further away from stealth-based gameplay towards an all-out open-world RPG.

Games since have spanned an array of periods and settings, from the American Revolution, to the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean, to Revolutionary Paris and Victorian London, to Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, Viking-era Britain, and even a recent dip into Medieval Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age.

As of this writing, there are 14 Assassin’s Creed mainline titles, as well as several spinoffs, ranging from near prequels to the storylines to spinoff arcade-style action titles.

It’s this last brand of Assassin’s Creed that has had the most success as of late, with recent entry Assassin’s Creed: Shadows having received generally positive reviews for streamlining many of the updated RPG-style elements while still retaining many of the core systems that long-time fans enjoyed.

Ubisoft reportedly pushed back Shadows several times in order to give the development team more time to polish, something longtime fans and players are hoping the studio will also be willing to do with this television series.

About This Assassin’s Creed Series

Specific details about the Netflix Assassin’s Creed series have not yet been announced, though the story will likely still largely center around the titular Assassins and their ancient war against the Templars over the destiny of humanity. The Animus, a specialized virtual reality machine which makes use of the player-character’s DNA to show the genetic memories of past relatives who are often involved in pivotal moments of history across the world, is expected to also be part of the narrative.

Acting and writing crews have not yet been announced for the new series, nor has a concrete storyline been revealed. Players are already wondering if the show will focus on existing Assassin’s Creed characters, or if it will take a more franchise-wide epic route and center around its in-show protagonists. While it’s expected that the Netflix series and the Assassin’s Creed video game series will largely remain in continuity with one another, we do know for a fact that they won’t be directly connected to the 2016 live-action film, starring Michael Fassbender, as it took an entirely different path.

For more on the Fassbender film, check out our breakdown of how its ending stacks up.

Fassbender’s Assassin’s Creed was a moderate box office success, but its critical reception was mixed, to say the least. It remains to be seen if this Netflix series will in any way reference the film or acknowledge its existence at all. But either way, with a ballooning streaming industry increasingly embracing big-budget, high-stakes, and lore-heavy science fiction and fantasy content—and a heightened interest in continuing to mine popular video game intellectual properties for potentially franchise-altering content—the timing may not be more perfect for Assassin’s Creed.

Games Are Becoming Big on the Small Screen

It’s not the only game-to-screen project that Netflix and other streamers are taking chances on, either. With the monumental success of HBO’s ultra-faithful and exceptionally well-executed adaptation of The Last of Us, a blueprint for how to adapt big-budget games to a small-screen series has been set. Netflix has seen its fair share of success in the IP-adaptation game with high-profile and successful series like The Witcher, though not without its fair share of behind-the-scenes missteps.

Can Assassin’s Creed join the ranks of The Witcher and The Last of Us? It has a ways to go before we find out, but at the very least, with an established and high-profile intellectual property, a robust sandbox to create an enormous and engrossing in-show world, and a veteran pair of showrunners at the helm, all the ingredients are in place to create the next big thing in fantasy-historical-adventure streaming series. For now, fans will have to simply bide their time as more details are revealed.