Variety is reporting this morning that all-around awesome son of a bitch Michael Fassbender is set to star and produce the long-in-development live-action Assassin’s Creed film. For the unfamiliar, this basically means Fassbender parkouring himself around the rooftops of history in a hooded cloak, stabbing Dan Brown characters with a wrist-grafted shiv. Yes, “fuck yeah” is an appropriate response.
This is fascinating news for a couple of other reasons, though. For one thing, as recent as last year, Sony was set to do the AC film, and it apparently crapped out, reportedly due to Sony looking at Prince of Persia and cringing, which is the correct reaction to that movie altogether. Since then, the article states Ubi wants to develop the film independently, via UbiSoft’s in-house movie production studio and with Fassbender and his production partner, get the director/writer/actor in place first, and get the studio in primarily as a distributor, which is really what MS should’ve been doing from the get-go with Halo instead of the fustercluck resulting in trying to boss the studios around after the fact. So it seems like Ubi’s got a handle on the production side.
The real curiosity is going to be what class of assassin Fassbender’s going to be playing.* There’s gripes aplenty to be had about continuing the whitewash and letting him just play Altair, but as a mainstream introduction to the universe, it makes the most sense to start there. The ambitious way would be to Quantum Leap the thing, and let the film jump between multiple assassins at multiple points in history, and there’s a dozen ways to slip Fassbender in there still, especially if they really decide to trip things up and milk the “bleeding” effect.
Point is, there’s limitless places for this thing to go, and while Fassbender will ace no matter what gets thrown at him, hope that UbiSoft shoots for the moon.
*-Damn that was a fun sentence to write.