Assassin’s Creed Live-Action Series Officially Greenlit by Netflix

The long-rumored Netflix series based on the Assassin’s Creed video game series has finally been greenlit by the streaming service. The project has been in development for years, with Ubisoft first announcing the series in 2020.

Netflix confirmed the live-action series has been greenlit in a statement to Variety, and has now tapped two showrunners to head up development. Roberto Patino and David Wiener will both be leading the series’ development, with Patino also serving as the writer for the series. Patino has worked previously on writing projects for FX’s Sons of Anarchy and HBO’s Westworld, while Wiener has run the Paramount+ Halo series as well as AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead.

“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,” Patino and Wiener said in a statement. “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 in their statement that they “continue to work closely with Ubisoft and Netflix to build a show that lives up to the Creed in all the best ways. We’ve got an amazing team on board, and we’re making a show that’s undeniable for fans all over the planet.”

A Popular Video Game Series With Tons of Lore

Ubisoft first announced the live-action series based on Assassin’s Creed in 2020, but little information has been shared since then. Netflix greenlit the series in early 2022, and the project’s scope and focus have been discussed for several years.

The Assassin’s Creed series is already a veteran, having originally debuted back in 2007. The first game was a hybrid “social stealth” action title set during the Crusades. But Ubisoft would find its greatest success with the Renaissance Italy trilogy—Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations—that introduced players to Ezio Auditore. This trio of games is some of the best received in the series’ entire run, thanks to their focus on historical drama, philosophical intrigue, and challenging, varied combat.

Assassin’s Creed has now become a bona fide multimedia franchise. Since its original launch in 2007, there have been 14 mainline games, each receiving multiple sequels. The series has largely shifted from a stealth-focused action series into an open-world RPG series, with wildly different settings spanning historical events like the American Revolution, the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean, Revolutionary Paris, and Victorian London, Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, Viking Britain, and most recently, the Islamic Golden Age in Baghdad.

Ubisoft’s most recent Assassin’s Creed game, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, just launched this year and takes place in the long-requested setting of feudal Japan. The game is reportedly one of the best-received games in recent years, and has been praised for tightening up the series’ newer RPG direction while still delivering the base features long-time fans of the franchise enjoy most. One factor for the game’s positive reception has been the studio’s willingness to delay the game’s release to avoid poor quality. A decision fans are now crossing their fingers that Netflix will take as well.

What We Know (and Don’t Know) About Netflix’s Series

For now, very few details about the series have been officially announced. However, that the narrative will at least center around the central conflict between the Assassins and Templars. These two secret societies have been fighting for control of humanity’s future for centuries. In each game, players take control of a modern-day character that explores the genetic memories of their ancestors through the Animus. These memories often place the characters in historical settings at important turning points in history all around the world.

Casting and plot details have not been announced, but fans are already theorizing whether the Netflix series will connect with existing characters or launch a brand new narrative. The live-action film starring Michael Fassbender was largely seen as being a separate narrative, and it is likely the Netflix series will also go its own way.

The Fassbender film did make a solid amount of money and has its fans, but was ultimately seen as a mixed success. Whether the Netflix series will connect to that film or not is still an open question. But with the streaming boom’s growing interest in dense, well-built lore that can power long-running fantasy series, along with both the high potential of new Assassin’s Creed material and big-budget video game adaptations remaining all the rage, now is as good a time as any to gamble on a new Assassin’s Creed narrative.

Netflix Makes A Big Gamble With Assassin’s Creed

Netflix has thrown a significant investment into the Assassin’s Creed series, but must do so in a very crowded field of big-budget adaptations of video game properties. The quality of these adaptations has been variable in recent years, but there are some modern success stories. HBO’s The Last of Us created a new standard for what an ultra-faithful and emotionally resonant adaptation can be.

Netflix itself has seen major success adapting The Witcher from games to the screen, albeit with some creative missteps of its own. But Assassin’s Creed now finds itself in a very crowded field, including at Netflix itself, which has three Witcher projects in development, as well as The Last of Us, as well as Amazon and Prime Video series based on Elden Ring and Halo, among others.

Ubisoft has also released at least one other live-action Assassin’s Creed series in the past. However, that series, Valhalla, is instead an anime series produced by Netflix. Valhalla largely ties in with Ubisoft’s Valhalla video game, but centers more on the player character’s ancestors instead.

Whether the upcoming live-action series from Netflix will be as gritty and hardcore in tone as that series, or instead mimic the more mainstream-friendly design of the regular games, is not yet known. But with Ubisoft’s clear and continued investment in the video game series, as well as Netflix’s streaming success with both this series and recent shows like The Witcher, the potential is there for Netflix to create its must-watch fantasy-historical epic with Assassin’s Creed.