Crystal Ball time
You know what, I am being a bit too mean to poor Ubisoft recently. I admit it. They're going through it right now, and though I think they're absolute plagues on the concept of creativity within our industry, I don't want them to just disappear from existence. They're never all that successful in their attempts to poison the gaming well, and therefore I figure they deserve to stick around and have the chance to fix up their image. Unfortunately I'm also a realist, which means I know that as times become dire Ubisoft are going to do what they do best and copy someone else hoping to leech off of what bought them their success. What pulled CDPR out of the gutter? Cyberpunk: Edgerunners? Well then, just wait for the new Assassin's Creed live action adaptation with bated breath!
Now we've actually had an Assassin's Creed live action adaptation before, and if you're only just slapping yourself in the head and wondering how you forgot that until just now, don't worry, you're not the one at fault here. The Micheal Fassbender starring Assassin's Creed movie was so legendarily forgettable that one can quite easily brush by the way that movie actually singlehandedly ruined the potential trajectory for the Assassin's Creed franchise. Okay, maybe not 'singlehandedly', the franchise had already slipped over itself and was floundering about for a while, but the movie kind of sealed the lid on the coffin and made it nigh on impossible to restart the purpose of this game franchise without bold and substantive narrative reform, both adjectives that simply don't appear in the Ubisoft employee handbook. But how could it have been that bad?
Simple. Around about the time that the movie was being worked on, the games had been running along a very formulaic but progressive thread which kept the draw of the games, the historical tourism action, connected by way of an overall meta storyline that was slowly unfolding. Until, of course, Ubisoft went for the big conclusion wrap-up event a little bit too early and decided to kill off their leading protagonist and antagonist in the same game. Now whilst in one way you could argue that this was a way to expand the potential of the series further by branching out into new modern day characters and explore their individual struggles against the tyranny of Abstergo bearing down on the Assassin cells- that never really was the point of Assassin's Creed, now was it? In Assassin's Creed the real 'characters' were the ancestors of the historical period (Desmond was never on the boxart, now was he?) and we came into the games in order to follow their stories of heroism throughout their historical heyday, learning about the modern day decedent character was more of an 'easter egg' side activity for the really dedicated. Keeping him around as a passive vector through which to explore the real excitement of historical fantasy action would have let the story progress in it's natural, perfectly serviceable, pace. But Ubisoft are stupid.
Thus the franchise ended up wandering about totally rudderless for a while, propped up by the strength of Black Flag's core narrative alone, until the premier of the Assassin's Creed movie. Now by natural extension of the 'live-action means legitimate' fallacy, rather than use this movie as a means through which to introduce the wider public to the basic set-up and framework of the Assassin's Creed universe, Ubisoft attempted to do a crash course introduction whilst also trying to make Michael Fassbender's character the new main hero of the franchise. So much did they buy into this narrative that they gifted the writers of this movie the single biggest potential over arching villain in the franchise which the games had been building up to for nearly a decade until that point, Abstergo CEO Alan Rikkin. Since the death of Vidic in 3, Alan's name was the only thing remaining as a feasible threat for these stories to build around. Without him, the modern day storyline of these games totally evaporated into a puff of smoke. It's telling that the most movement the main story of the franchise has seen since then is through the DLC missions in Watch_Dogs Legion, which weren't themselves very exploratory.
But despite that total franchise-wide disaster, it's inevitable that the Assassin's Creed brand will return to live action screens and we just need to ask ourselves now; in what form? For one, it has to be a TV show. The movie tried to juggle a modern day narrative with Spanish Inquisition era 'action sequences'. I can't call those historical sections a 'story' because we spent so little time there learning anything regarding character names, plot stakes or personal/ overall motives. There simply wasn't enough time to cover both the modern and the historical. I propose that with a TV show we could more appropriately split screen time without losing either plot, and split in into the appropriate ratio, which should have been 7/10 to the historical stuff. (The movie spent more time in the modern day. Cheaper budget, more boring movie.)
What about the Assassin themselves? Well personally I'm always a proponent for these adaptations telling their own stories with their own characters within the established universe. (I know there's people out there who think otherwise, but they've clearly never seen Hollywood try to adapt anything directly. At least this way fans can easier divorce the probable dumpster fire with the franchise that they love.) However I know that Ubisoft are deeply boldness-phobic, especially given their shift of fortunes recently, and they'll probably want to stick to a story that has worked in the past. As such there's only one real stop on our search for a historical protagonist Ezio. Altair may be the OG, but he's also practically personality-less, Ezio is the perfect mix of watchable, morally agreeable and action literate. If you want to launch a franchise that deftly darts around the potential moral impact of 'murdering for peace' like the games do, make sure you do it with a man so charming you want to die by his hands.
The best part about an Ezio series is that just embarking on that journey will present the audience with three pre-written stories right off the bat. At least, that's three free historical written stories; and this is where it gets interesting. What I propose is that we have a distinct modern day narrative which follows another descendant of Ezio Auditore whi isn't Desmond. They'll still follow the same rough events, witness the same Ezio life events that Desmond once did, but perhaps come away with different lessons and develop different skills and personality quirks as a consequence of experiencing them. Picture this; a new distant relation of Ezio who is swept by the excitement of the clandestine Assassin's and their war against the Templars, who wants so desperately to stand up against the oppressive world only she seems able to perceive and believes the Assassin order to be the kindred spirits she has searched for all her life. Only then, through some means I can't be bothered to concoct, she learns herself to be a descendant of a simply legendary Renaissance Assassin who she simply must learn more about! Cue the seasons of discovering her ancestor and learning his skills through the 'Bleeding effect' and coming to love the rebellious spirit she is seeing during her Animus trips. But as the series goes on, and Ezio's journey becomes more grim, she finds her expectations tipped on their head, as the real human toll of living your entire life as a blunt-force tool chipping away at an unyielding darkness to serve some vague ideal of freedom starts to really play out across her various Animus sessions. Sacrificing your youth and all potential for contentedness and love, watching friends give up the fight or end up being killed in a never-ending back and forth of revenge doused by revenge, and ending up wearing your former pithy confidence as more a nostalgic mask of the passion you used to have, rather than a true-to-life reflection of the burning soul therein. A husk of a hero until his final years. The modern day protagonist we leave with at the tail end of the season is a young woman weighed down by a much older soul, tempered but humbled by the life she's sped through, approaching the world of Assassin's and Templars with a more sensible and prudent head on her shoulders.
A basic framework I literally came up with as I wrote it, but that there is an example of just how much potential I think an Assassin's Creed series could really have if you just put someone in charge who likes the franchise. I shouldn't need to even say that, but we've seen so very often how the people who man these adaptations more-often-than-not seem to actively hate the product they're working on and simply wish to use it's characters as flesh-puppets through which to speak their own stories that have nothing to do with the originals. Velma is just the latest example of this, it's like the 'in thing' to do across the entertainment industry. A great show would absolutely send butts racing to the digital isles to shore up Ubisoft sales, a lot more reliably than another NFT collection would, I'll tell you that for free! So I guess we can just sit here and wait for the inevitable show announcement to be made and then we can see if they're making the same mistakes they did last time, or are at least trying to reshape their approach like I propose. Either way, I expect back-pats for my incredible soothsaying when the announcement is made. I'll accept congratulatory comments too. (What do you mean they already announced a series?- Goddammit Netflix!)
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