Five years after initial reports, Netflix has officially confirmed that a live-action Assassin’s Creed series is in development. Netflix’s deal with Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft has been in place since 2020, with the project cycling through multiple creative teams over the years. But Roberto Patino and David Wiener, who was also one of the writers for the Halo show, are officially set as the series’s showrunners, creators, and executive producers.
“We’ve been fans of ‘Assassin’s Creed’ since its release in 2007,” Wiener and Patino said, as reported by Variety. “Every day we work on this show, we come away excited and humbled by the possibilities that Assassin’s Creed opens to us. 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.”
The official logline describes the series as a battle between two covert factions — one striving to shape humanity’s future through control and manipulation, the other determined to protect free will. Unless the show makes major changes, these factions should be the Templars and the Assassins, respectively. Set against the backdrop of key moments in history, the story follows characters locked in a secret war to determine the fate of mankind.
“It is about power and violence and sex and greed and vengeance,” Wiener and Patino said. “But more than anything, this is a show about the value of human connection, across cultures, across time. And it’s about what we stand to lose as a species, when those connections break. We’ve got an amazing team behind us with the folks at Ubisoft and our champions at Netflix, and we’re committed to creating something undeniable for fans all over the planet.”
In the games, advanced technology is used to unlock genetic memories of past Assassins in order to locate powerful artifacts known as the Pieces of Eden. A film adaptation starring Michael Fassbender was released in 2016 to less-than-stellar reviews.
As for when the series might take place within the franchise’s time-hopping narrative, Netflix’s previous 10-second teaser hints at inspiration from the iconic Ezio Auditore trilogy. That storyline began with Assassin’s Creed II in 2009, followed by Brotherhood in 2010 and Revelations in 2011. The teaser’s musical cue is lifted directly from “Ezio’s Family,” the signature theme from Jesper Kyd’s Assassin’s Creed II soundtrack.
