On Video Game Movies

Ubisoft has done something interesting. It has chosen Michael Fassbender (IMDB) to play the lead in an upcoming Assassin's Creed movie. Of course, the fact that an Assassin's Creed movie is going to be released is not all that surprising. What is interesting is that Ubisoft created a movie studio, Ubisoft Motion Pictures, and is maintaining creative control of the project by choosing their own writer and director.

The traditional method of releasing a video game-based movie is to license the IP to a Hollywood Studio and hand over control of the project to them. What Ubisoft is doing is not only maintaining control of their IP and the creative process, but also making sure that whatever fiction is produced by the project fits into the Assassin's Creed universe.

It is an intelligent strategy and it seems strange that other game developers have not attempted this previously. Several developers have licensed their game franchises to movie studios and been dissappointed with the results (check out this list on Wikipedia, the highest Rotten Tomatoes score is a 43%) or have had films end up in eternal Hollywood Limbo (see: Halo franchise). There is no guarantee that the movies produced by Ubisoft will be any better, but the strategy has worked for Marvel (their lowest Rotten Tomatoes score is a 67% according to this Wikipedia list) and book adaptations are generally better when the author of the book is involved in the process.

The reasoning seems sound: if the person or group most familiar with the content is involved with the adaptation, then the end result will be closer to the source material and appeal more to the audience that was originally interested in the source material.  We will have to wait and see if that holds true for Assassin's Creed and Ubisoft.

 

QUICK NOTE: Jeremy Hansen, candidate for a Vermont state legislature seat posted a comment on my post about his campaign here. He has a huge Q&A session posted at Slashdot.com and addresses some of the concerns that I mentioned in my post. It's definitely worth a read.

Andrew

 

Reading:

Leviathan Wakes, James S.A. Corey. Page 404/582