Assassin’s Creed Movie Modeled After Batman Begins and Blade Runner, Budget Revealed

Ubisoft Motion Pictures CEO Jean Julien Baronnet has said that the upcoming Assassin’s Creed movie will be inspired by Batman Begins and Blade Runner. In an interview with French magazine, Premiere, Baronnet said that the company told actor Michael Fassbender that Assassin’s Creed is an “enormous brand” and it wanted to build the project together. Translated excerpts from the interview (courtesy of Den of Geek) can be found below:

We told [Fassbender] that we were going to build the project together, that we have an enormous brand and we want to make a film modelled on features like Batman Begins or Blade Runner. That’s what we’re aiming for. We promised him that he could work with the scriptwriters, that we were going to bring him into all the key creative choices.

Baronnet acknowledged that movies based on video games haven’t particularly done well in the past, but he believes that’s because they were made by film studios that didn’t understand video games and/or video game companies who believed that “because they knew how to make games, they also knew how to make films.” Ubisoft believes it will avoid such a scenario by remaining autonomous as opposed to teaming up with a Hollywood studio, and by bringing talented people on board. 

Baronnet also said that it was structurally challenging to develop an assassin because the two characters Fassbender will be playing are in different time periods.

Assassin was complicated to develop, because you’re working with two time periods, one contemporary and one historical. With two heros, as you have Callum, the modern-day hero, and his ancestor Aguilar, who have two parallel stories which meet up. Generally in a film, you only have one hero. And with the link between the past and the present, you can’t have one of the stories taking precedence over the other. So structurally, it’s very complicated.

Baronnet went on to reveal that the movie’s budget is in between $150-200 million and Ubisoft hopes to attract a wider audience beyond video game fans.

Our big gamble, is that it works for three audiences. Fans of our games, which there are some 95 million of; fans of mainstream cinema who are going to see Star Wars and Spider-Man; and in parallel, we’re also aiming it people who would never think of going to see an Assassin film, people who like independent films.

Assassin’s Creed movie is scheduled for release in 2016.

[Source: Premiere via Den of Geek, GameSpot]

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