Assassin’s Creed: A Story About Human Connection Through Time

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed has been making the rounds for adaptation for quite some time now. In fact, since 2020, we’ve been waiting for news on what Netflix’s next move with the hit video game series will be. The wait is finally over. Netflix is moving forward with Assassin’s Creed as a live-action series, with two new showrunners now on board.

Netflix Announces Showrunners for Assassin’s Creed Series

Netflix officially confirmed Assassin’s Creed is now “in development” after a busy period of behind-the-scenes turnover in its potential live-action series. Now, Netflix has named showrunners for the series after multiple shifts in creative leadership.

Veteran showrunners Roberto Patino and David Wiener will head up Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed series. Patino has written for shows like Sons of Anarchy (FX) and Westworld (HBO), while Wiener has led the production on shows like AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead and Paramount+’s Halo.

In a joint statement, Patino and Wiener both expressed their excitement for the project.

“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,” they continued. “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 also spoke on their excitement to be working with Ubisoft and Netflix to bring Assassin’s Creed to life in the best way possible.

“We are working with Ubisoft and Netflix to build a show that’s undeniable for fans all over the planet,” they said. “We have an amazing team on the ground in Paris right now and in our offices in LA. We couldn’t be more grateful to be given this opportunity to bring this amazing world and these stories to life.”

Assassin’s Creed is a Franchise With a Long History

Assassin’s Creed is a long-running franchise that’s no stranger to big-budget storytelling. The franchise started in 2007 as a social stealth action game, set against the backdrop of the Crusades. While the original games were well received, it was the Renaissance Italy trilogy—Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations—that put Assassin’s Creed on the map and became one of the most popular and recognizable video game series in history, thanks in large part to the introduction of Ezio Auditore.

From 2009’s Assassin’s Creed II to 2023’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the franchise has released 14 mainline entries in 18 years, each one taking a different approach to history, while gradually shifting from its stealth-action roots to a more open-world RPG style. In that time, the franchise’s periods and locales have spanned the American Revolution, the Caribbean and the Golden Age of Piracy, Revolutionary Paris, Victorian London, Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, Viking-era Britain, and just most recently, Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age.

As for the most recent release, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been well-received by critics and players alike, with its most recent update in the January 2024 review aggregate Metacritic at 80/100, an impressive score for a Ubisoft release. It also marks the first time players will get to experience the franchise’s long-requested setting of feudal Japan. The consensus is that Shadows has polished the Assassin’s Creed franchise’s newer RPG leanings while holding onto what older fans loved about it. One big reason the game has found early success has been Ubisoft’s commitment to delaying it in the name of quality and assurance, a promise we hope to see fulfilled in Netflix’s adaptation.

At the moment, little is known about Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed series. The series, of course, like the games themselves, is expected to be focused around the ongoing secret war between Assassins and Templars, two ancient organizations fighting to decide humanity’s future. Tying the entire franchise together, across different periods and continents, is a storytelling device called the Animus, a futuristic machine that allows the modern protagonists to access the genetic memories of their ancestors, often taking place in critical moments of world history.

Casting and the series’ precise plot have yet to be announced, leaving fans to speculate on whether the show will use established characters from the Assassin’s Creed franchise, or go in a different direction of creating its own. It’s worth noting that the one other major Assassin’s Creed entry to hit the screen, the 2016 live-action film, starred Michael Fassbender and took a route separate from the established lore of the games themselves. So it’s more than possible the series will take that same approach, but no guarantees. The Fassbender-led film was a mild box office success but got middling reviews from critics and fans.

And though it’s unclear whether Netflix’s version will directly tie into that film or not, or even acknowledge it, the franchise’s journey into the world of live-action television has the potential to benefit from streaming’s already-proven appetite for lore-heavy, high-budget sci-fi/fantasy worlds (games are just another example of these kinds of worlds), while also taking advantage of Hollywood’s ever-increasing interest in big-budget video game adaptations. Netflix greenlighting Assassin’s Creed feels timely in the best of ways, and could usher in one of streaming’s next big historical-fantasy sagas.

Netflix greenlighting Assassin’s Creed is a big play in a space that’s more crowded and less of a gamble than it used to be. Game-to-screen adaptations are getting both more popular and more respected. HBO’s The Last of Us set a standard for what a faithful, emotionally-driven adaptation could achieve both critically and commercially. Netflix has had success with the similarly fantasy-historical franchise The Witcher, though not without its share of creative growing pains.

It remains to be seen whether Assassin’s Creed can reach similar heights. But between veteran showrunners, a franchise with a ready-made global brand, and a historical sandbox as broad as the medieval world, there’s every reason to think it could find success both critical and commercial.

For now, we just have to wait and see what Netflix and Ubisoft’s vision for Assassin’s Creed looks like. The only thing we know for sure is that we’re going to see plenty more updates on casting, filming, and development going forward. If Netflix and Ubisoft get this right, it could be one of the streaming era’s most epic fantasy-historical hits.