Assassin’s Creed TV Show vs. Halo: Same Showrunner, Different Legacy

Ubisoft’s popular Assassin’s Creed video game series is coming to the small screen in a big way. Netflix has officially given the green light to a live-action series, although it has been trying to make the leap from games to television for quite some time.

News of the streaming service’s continued development comes more than a year after they initially signed on to the project. According to Netflix, a pair of showrunners have been appointed to the new series. Roberto Patino and David Wiener were revealed to have been signed to helm the production, with Netflix affirming it will be a series, not a film.

Patino has written for several television shows, including Sons of Anarchy for FX and Westworld for HBO, while Wiener has worked on AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead and most notably served as showrunner for Paramount+’s adaptation of Halo.

The two showrunners shared a joint statement on being appointed to the production, offering some insight into their intentions for the show.

“Every day we work on this show, we come away excited and humbled by the possibilities that Assassin’s Creed opens to us,” they 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.”

They continued: “We’re working with Ubisoft and Netflix to be scrupulous in how we adapt these characters and their world, while being unapologetic in telling the version of Assassin’s Creed that best serves the vision we have for the show. We have an amazing team already on board, and can’t wait to show fans all over the planet what we’ve got cooking.”

The Next Chapter for a Historic Franchise

Assassin’s Creed has been around for more than a decade and a half, the last 18 years to be exact. The first game was a “social stealth” action video game, set during the period of the Crusades.

Ubisoft’s flagship series saw continued success, and by the time its Renaissance Italy trilogy of Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations was released, the title had an iconic reputation. These games would introduce the series’ mainstay Ezio Auditore and cement Assassin’s Creed as a must-play series, full of mythos, dramatic historical events, philosophical inquiries, stealth, and parkour.

The series now spans 14 mainline games (not including the numerous spin-offs) since its release in 2007. The franchise transitioned from being focused on social stealth action to a larger open-world RPG. The settings have been wildly diverse, with each new era including everything from the American Revolution to the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean, Revolutionary Paris and Victorian London, Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, Viking-era Britain, and most recently, even medieval Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows, released in 2023, most recently sends players to feudal Japan. It was a long-awaited location for fans, having been requested since at least the 2013 game, Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation. The game was generally well-received and is seen as something of a reboot that refines the newer RPG mechanics while appealing to fans of the more “classic” version of the game.

The studio held firm and delayed the game multiple times, a move appreciated by many gamers, but which also often means game titles have a better chance of delivering on quality. It is a sentiment Netflix is sure hoping to follow in as the streaming landscape has grown hungry for large-scale, deep lore series.

Key Details and What’s Next

There have been few details on what exactly Netflix and its new showrunners have in mind for the series. For fans of the Assassin’s Creed games, however, there is some general understanding of the characters and the settings. As with the video games, the show will likely focus on the secret conflict between two ancient orders: The Assassins and the Templars, who are in opposition over the very future of humanity.

The device that bridges the two is the Animus, a machine that allows the modern descendants of these figures to relive the memories of their ancestors in full 3D. As a result, this generally means that the Assassins are often placed within key historical settings and events around the world.

Cast members and potential storylines have yet to be detailed for the Netflix series, and as of now, it’s up in the air whether this will connect to certain characters and narratives from the previous games. It is certainly possible, but less likely than the 2016 film that was helmed by a different creative team and which starred Michael Fassbender, took a unique path with the story. Netflix has its franchise to establish, and will more than likely go its way as well.

The Fassbender-led feature was not a blockbuster hit but managed to earn mixed reviews with an audience score hovering around 75 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Whether Netflix will acknowledge the game in the future remains to be seen. But the streaming service could not have chosen a more popular time to start on its high-budget video game adaptation.

The industry is certainly seeing a rise in game-to-screen adaptations with a new focus on being high fidelity to the game, resulting in success stories like HBO’s The Last of Us. Netflix has even seen its success, although not without creative growing pains with The Witcher. But whether Assassin’s Creed can top those or even hit those levels of fandom is not yet known.

The groundwork, however, certainly is in place, and Netflix has at its disposal an A-list of showrunners. With streaming services’ desire for massive fantasy-historical epics only increasing, and the gaming world’s large appetite for lore to sink their teeth into, now is certainly the right time to dive in.