Although the entire gaming world hoped that Assassin’s Creed would finally topple the stigma surrounding video game movie adaptations, it sadly fell short. It received horrendous critical reviews and failed to wow audiences at domestic box offices. This was despite having a star-studded cast that was led by Benedict Cumberbatch. The film fared well at International box offices, but the numbers weren’t high enough to call the film a success.
This didn’t slow Ubisoft down at all. The company is continuing its push to bring a few of its other properties to the big screen. The biggest franchise on the short list is Splinter Cell. Already signed-on to star in the film is Dark Knight Rises alumni, Tom Hardy, who will star and produce the film, along with John Wick producer Basil Iwanyk. Iwanyk spoke with Collider about the status of the Splinter Cell film:
“We’ve got a script. It’s a little long, but it’s the best script we’ve had. Now that I’m back from Mexico City, we’re going in there to figure out how to cut some pages and give it to [Tom] Hardy. This draft kind of addressed Tom’s notes. We’re going to give it to Hardy in the next couple of weeks and hopefully try to get it done this year.”
Iwanyk states that Assassin’s Creed isn’t a box office flop just yet. The film has yet to roll out completely in the international market:
“The story of the financial success of Assassin’s Creed is yet to be told because we do live in an international world; it’s still rolling out. Assassin’s Creed had a very specific world to it and a very specific storyline, character, all that stuff. Splinter Cell really is a first-person shooter game.
And so the challenge of making Splinter Cell interesting was we didn’t have this IP with a very specific back story. That allowed us to make up our own world and really augment and fill out the characters. I don’t think one applies to the other because I don’t think our movie will feel like a movie that came out of a video game, I think it’ll feel like a badass, Tom Hardy action movie, which is what we wanted.
He is a gamer. He’s also a guy who has a lot of friends in that world, not the gaming world but the Special Ops world. He wants to play this character really, really badly. That’s what makes it exciting for all of us because Tom playing this character is an event.”
Iwanyk goes on to say that Splinter Cell will have to overcome the big hurdle in their way. It’s being compared to James Bond and Jason Borne:
“The good and the bad news is that, obviously, the Bond movies have had a resurgence and the Jason Bourne movies are the Jason Bourne movies, so we’re trying to stay away from those movies in terms of tone, in terms of bad guys, in terms of settings. What’s a world that we haven’t seen yet? What’s an area of the world and a conflict that we haven’t really touched upon in movies in a long time, to make it feel fresh?”
Iwanyk Says that Splinter Cell is shooting for a ‘hard PG-13’ rating, rather than jumping on the R-rating bandwagon.
Splinter Cell is currently scheduled to hit theaters sometime in 2018.
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