- calendar_today August 6, 2025
Can Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed Break the Video Game Curse?
Video game giant Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series may be 18 years old, but it is only now making its way to the small screen. Netflix has greenlit the series for an official live-action Assassin’s Creed series.
It’s been rumored that a series has been on Netflix’s mind for some time, if not before they got their hands on Fable. The service had already secured talent for the show last fall before things slowed. Netflix has now confirmed the series is in production and has found its vision in showrunners Roberto Patino and David Wiener.
Wiener is no stranger to game adaptations with Paramount+ and Halo, and as a writer for AMC’s The Walking Dead, while Patino has experience in writing action-dramas on both HBO’s Westworld and FX’s Sons of Anarchy. In their joint statement, the pair not only confirmed the series is in the works but said they were honored to be doing so with such material.
“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,” the creators said. “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 commitment to the Assassin’s Creed franchise, as well as Netflix’s confidence in their vision. They’re on the ground in Malta for pre-production and collaborating with Ubisoft, “an amazing team of producers and creatives” as they pull together “the right group to bring this undeniable story to screens all over the planet.”
Assassin’s Creed: Everything You Need to Know about Netflix’s Series
Assassin’s Creed has traveled through history and has a robust library of games to its name, and its first television outing will be no different in this regard. The series made its debut as a stealth action game back in 2007 and went on to become one of the best video game series to date in terms of critical and commercial success.
Assassin’s Creed’s biggest selling point was its ability to fit a multi-hour story in every entry, with its voice and personality, and a balance of action, storytelling, and open-world gameplay.
The series has historically been known for its social stealth gameplay, having its players take down targets without being detected. Its historically non-linear structure and open-ended gameplay gave the series something similar to the MMO RPG structure, with players leveling up, gaining skills, and taking on side quests, all part of a larger Assassin’s Creed open world fantasy universe. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed games were large and daunting at the time, a welcome change in a market full of short, samey games.
Renaissance Trilogy Elevates Franchise’s Fame
Released in 2009, 2010, and 2011, respectively, Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations are still some of the most fondly remembered entries in the series. The Italian Renaissance is Assassin’s Creed’s most recognizable game to fans of the series, likely because of its lead character, Ezio Auditore.
This Trilogia dell’Italia rinascimentale introduced a large number of players to the franchise, and while modern audiences are a far cry from Renaissance Italy, Ezio Auditore remains a popular figure in the modern iteration of Assassin’s Creed.
Assassin’s Creed’s 18-year run so far has seen 14 mainline entries in the series that have reworked and modernized the series from its stealthy, ancient beginnings to a full-fledged open-world RPG structure. The places explored have become larger and wider in scope, but just as adventuresome in their settings, as the world has been able to travel as far as the American Revolution, the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean, Revolutionary Paris, Victorian London, Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, Viking era-Britain, and more recently in 2023’s, Assassin’s Creed, the Baghdad of the Islamic Golden Age.
The Most Recent Game, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Showcases the Series’ Potential and All That’s at Stake
As of late 2023, Ubisoft released the 15th installment of the series, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, which was an unexpected hit. Set in feudal Japan, a much-requested location for fans of the series, it’s finally here and has already won over fans who thought Ubisoft had let the series lapse into mediocrity by focusing on other projects.
Fans have expressed appreciation to Ubisoft for actually delaying the game so that it could be better, which is a breath of fresh air for fans expecting a new game every two years. Assassin’s Creed: Shadows was an unexpected hit as the historical RPG has been revamped in this more recent entry. If the same can be said for Netflix’s upcoming Assassin’s Creed series, well, we’re on board.
Showrunners Wiener and Patino have hit the ground running and have gone to Malta, where they will be filming the series with Ubisoft and Netflix.
Details So Far about the Netflix Assassin’s Creed Series
Not much is known about the upcoming Assassin’s Creed series so far. The timeline, characters, and overall premise of the series have not been divulged yet, and as with the games, it can be presumed that the series will be about the ancient war between Assassins and Templars who fight to control and guide humanity’s fate.
In both the games and as a Netflix series, the Assassins are assumed to be the heroes of the story, and the Templars to be their villains. A central aspect of the Assassin’s Creed franchise in both its games and live-action series, for the same reasons, is the Animus, which has been around for a while and was conceived as a device that can unlock genetic memories of ancestors through a neural-link type simulation. As players use the Animus to relive and experience their ancestors’ lives, most series and game storylines will have characters inhabiting pivotal moments in history across the world.
Netflix has not yet announced any cast members or the specifics of its story, and fans have been speculating whether the series will follow the games or make use of new characters. Since Fassbender’s film is presumed to follow a different storyline, it is likely that Netflix is also pursuing its avenue, and that the Fassbender film will not be connected in the show canon at all.
Even though the 2016 live-action film starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard was not critically acclaimed by any means, it was mildly successful and made a profit, and fans hope this series will expand on the lore and promise of the Assassin’s Creed world.
Netflix is well-versed in setting up big-name game adaptations with much fanfare, such as Fable. While Assassin’s Creed is being readied for production, Netflix recently released the Fable live-action series pilot directed by Morgan O’Neill. Netflix is also, for all we know, still in discussions to get a Halo series from one of its biggest IPs.
Amazon and Paramount have also been on a game adaptation roll with Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series out in full and Paramount’s Battlefield 2042 live-action series in the works.
Game-to-screen adaptations were once thought to be impossible and controversial due to fan expectations and market oversaturation, but recent entries such as HBO’s The Last of Us have proven otherwise. The Last of Us is not only exceptionally faithful to the games, but it is also now a bona fide TV success story and critical darling, a feat Netflix’s adaptations have been trying to replicate in The Witcher and others.
Netflix and Ubisoft Are Betting Big on Assassin’s Creed
The creative team at Netflix, as well as Ubisoft, knows what’s at stake when they bring Assassin’s Creed to the small screen, and fans are hopeful. Assassin’s Creed could very well be the next major fantasy-historical epic to rule over the streaming world, but will it also be able to set a high bar for game adaptations? We’ll see.
